As you may, or may not, have seen this site was down for most of the morning. Actually, it wasn't down, it was a DNS problem so typing in 'muttmansion.com' would take you to the Network Solutions landing page instead of this web server.
What I was trying to do yesterday, and succeeded in doing today, was to move the email service of the site over to Google. As it turns out you can have Google host all of your email in your domain, for free. With up to two gigabytes per account, which is really amazing.
Why go to all the trouble? Turns out when you run mail out of your own domain then spam becomes a real problem. It was a problem for Lori to be sure. But for me I would regularly have about 60 messages in my email inbox every morning, of which three were actual mail, and the rest were spam. And then I would have about 180 in my spam folder where my email client actually did catch them.
So the idea of putting my iPhone on my raw email account, well, that just wasn't going to happen. But it could happen if I moved my email hosting to Google, because they do have very good spam filtering, and I wouldn't have to change my email address. So I've done that. And in fact, I've added an additional level of spam protection at pobox.com so that I now have three different levels of spam filtering. First at pobox.com, then Google, then at my email client. Though, honestly, nothing is getting through to the third level today.
The switchover was a pain for a couple of hours, but all in all, it's a big step up. The Google mail service is far more reliable than my web host. I can now access my email through a real web client, as opposed to the wonky one on my web host. The spam filtering now allows both Lori and I to use our iPhones to read our email. And it's completely free. Which you have to love.
I can't tell you what a joy it is to have effective spam filtering again. Now when something shows up in my email, it's actually a message that's important to me, and not just another bank scam or viagra ad.
A good deal all around. Highly recommended.
Posted by jherr at August 6, 2007 02:04 PMI'm kind-of worried about gmail.
I set up an account so that I could send email to my husband while I'm at work, because I work nights and occasionally have a thought that should be passed on at a time when I shouldn't call.
Just before our vacation, our pet sitter quit at the last minute. My husband sent me an email about a prospective replacement (stepson of a World of Warcraft guild member). In the series of 4 emails, one gave the guy's general location, something like "103 St and Columbus."
The top ad next to the last email was for a dog walker on the Upper West Side.
The relevance first impressed me and then worried me.
In exchange for all this free storage (and sorting capability), you're giving them data about you. And when you're giving them the communications between your phone and your wife's phone, you're giving them the good stuff. They have it indexed and ready to hand over to our government, which doesn't need a court order anymore these days.
For users of regular text messages, someone could probably get the contents and read them one by one. For users of google mail, someone could probably get the email addresses of senders and recipients of any message including the word "abortion," even misspelled, cross-referenced with their name, phone number, a map to their house, and driving directions.
Posted by: Donna at August 7, 2007 05:31 AMI understand your point completely. A good friend of mine who was helping me said flat out that 'this is a road I cannot follow you on' because of this exact issue.
I've never thought of my email as private though, unless I encrypt it, which I never do. So I never say anything in email that I wouldn't stand up in court and testify to. If I have something sensitive to say, I say it on the phone. And if it's super-sensitive, I'll only do it face to face.
Posted by: jherr at August 7, 2007 07:55 AMThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
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