Entries tagged 'email'

a joe job directed at my wife’s domain was the final little push i needed to start migrating all of our mail handling over to google apps. i am not super-excited to put it all in the hands of google, but free is a tough price to beat.

i am also working on shifting the primary dns for all of our various domains to everydns, which i was already using for secondary service (with an unlisted primary). the interface is clunkier than just editing the tinydns data file, but it is one less service i have to worry about.

i like the idea of apple’s mobileme, but i wonder if it will be possible to use external addresses with it. they say: “With MobileMe Mail, you can create an email address that’s personal and easy to remember. Maybe it’s yourname@me.com or maybe it’s something clever. Whatever you think up, it will be your best email address yet.”

my best email address yet is the one that is portable to other services. my mac.com address is totally useless, since i never saw enough value to .mac and it no longer works.

it seems like an odd choice of addresses to spam, but i noticed i was getting a lot of spam to the address i had listed in the perl who’s who. i changed it to a date-stamped address, and i was getting spam to that address in a matter of days. so now i have changed it again to an address that is pre-configured to bounce everything.

if you think mail is a spam, just fucking bounce it. i have now gotten fucked twice in as many months because of gmail filtering really important emails into the spam folder. i really have more important things to do than babysit an overloaded spam mailbox just because gmail’s spam filtering is so pathetic.

to appease my non-technical readers, i will just mention in passing that the breakfast of spam, rice, and eggs is yummy.

on to the technical gobbledygook.

i’m really disappointed by gmail’s spam handling. i listed my gmail address on my about page, so it eventually made it into some spammers list and is now getting inundated with spam. there are 1240 messages in the spam folder, and i get about five to ten obvious spam emails in the inbox every day, mostly lottery and financial transaction scams.

have i mentioned lately how much i hate systems that filter spam into a folder? just bounce the damn messages and let the sender sort it out.

i also get a bunch of spam through my apache.org address. i should figure out if there’s some way i can configure things there to not accept mail that isn’t addressed directly to me. or maybe i should just give up the address when i move on to emeritus membership.

my mail handling could be a whole lot smarter. i started using gmail because i didn’t have to worry about email systems that rejected mail from my system because it didn’t have reverse dns set up, or sometimes end up on a blacklist due to nearby hosts, or whatever. the gmail interface is not bad, but i think i want to get all my mail back into one system.

i have some vague ideas about an amazon s3-backed mail system, but no real motivation to get started on it. i’d also like to write a mail client that behaved like i want. something like a gui mutt with some gmail goodness thrown in.

i noticed last week that i was getting stock-related spam at the address that was only ever given to tdameritrade (when it was just ameritrade). fortunately it’s easy to shut down an address like this and shift to a new one. we’ll see how long that one lasts.

i just got some spam to an email address that was only used for registering at emusic. i hate that.

i’ve basically caught up on the emails that have been lingering in my inbox, taunting me and my lack of motivation to answer them. (some people play the “i’m so busy” card, but i’m willing to admit that i’m just lame.)

but i can blame some of my recent lameness in apparently not answering emails on my server getting caught up in a spam blacklist. so there’s probably a few that i answered but only i know that because the reply was eaten by some spam filter somewhere. now i’ve been migrated to a new address block, so that should be less of an issue.

matt sergeant’s article about using qpsmtpd is noteworthy for reasons other than it has my name in it.

i’m still running a pretty minimal set of qpsmtpd plugins since i upgraded by server to ubuntu. my main source of spam is my old college address, which is so ancient that it is deeply embedded in the mailing lists that spammers swap. and apparently they aren’t running very good antispam software at hmc. (i think they expect each user to set up spamassassin on their own.)

here’s an interesting tidbit i picked up from the hmc cs department site: a co-inventor of sql, don chamberlin, is a fellow alum.

i have managed completely flush my personal email inbox, and nearly flush my work email inbox.

i’m resisting the urge to keep them that way by setting it up to discard all new mail.

this does mean that if i didn’t answer an email you sent, i either lost it or hate you. (probably the former.)