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Email Lives!

Hey Pete, didn’t you hear? Email is broken! Yup, it’s been broken since 2003 at least, if not longer…

I like email. I like that when I create an email, it is saved on my own device (computer, phone, etc.) and then a copy of it is sent to someone else, and it doesn’t matter what kind of device that person is using, or what services they are signed up with, or any of those other crazy things like in the bad old days.

Remember when Prodigy users couldn’t email Compuserve users, or whatever the hell those other long-gone services were called? (Walled Gardens or Silos is what they were sometimes called.) To some degree, I feel like the Internet created this level playing field where everyone had to learn to get along and all be (somewhat) compatible. An email address is such a low barrier to entry… like a phone number. Imagine if you had to know if your friend used Verizon, or AT&T or some other company before you could even call them. (I know, you damn kids all use Skype or GTalk now, so again, you won’t see my point here.)

You can have an email address and not (appear to) be associated with any specific service or company. If you push people towards your Twitter account. You are reliant on Twitter. They control your identity and your messages, to some degree. It’s usually the same with Yammer, or any other system which might be used by some people to replace email because they think email is broken.

I’ve got emails that are easily more than 10 years old that I can go back to and read. They are on my own computer, and they are backed up. I can’t even get to Twitter messages I created just 3 years ago, because they won’t let me access them. There are probably solutions to this, but I don’t think Twitter is interested in any of them, as they don’t really help their bottom line. Companies and the services they run disappear, they get shut down, they die. Email is this “thing” that can’t really be killed even if all the companies that make email products die. It sort of reminds me of HTTP, a set of standards everyone has to adhere to. (Quick, look for the “HTTP is dead!” folks, I’m sure they’re out there…)

IM is another thing… I’m pretty sure that by default Apple’s iChat does not log messages. I’ve had the experience (more than once) of an iChat user telling me to resend the message I sent 10 seconds earlier because they closed their chat window. I know there are ways to fix this, but again, IM comes with the “people on this network may not be able to talk to people on that network” problem, as well as the idea that the messages are nothing you’d want to save… unless you want to do a lot of work to figure out how to save them.

Maybe I’m mostly happy with email because it works for me, and I’ve gotten used to how it works. It’s not perfect, but for now, it’s still much better than many of the proposed alternatives… It’s been around for nearly 40 years now, which makes it older than most of the people who seem to think it should die. But hey, can you blame them? Those damn kids are always trying to take over.

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Email ain’t (completely) broken

I know that everyone likes to say that email is broken, and to some degree I agreed with this due to the fact that the amount of spam I used to get far outweighted the legitimate email I got every day. (Of course I still never suggested that email was broken.)

I was using Apple’s Mail.app, as well as Thunderbird, which both do spam detection, and running SpamAssassin on the server, and spam was still getting through, but I could live with it.

Then the bad thing happened, which was the server being pretty much brought to it’s knees (does a server have knees?) due to so much damn illegitimate email coming in, and SpamAssassin trying to deal with it all. The load went from less than 1 up 50 at one point. (We turned off SpamAssassin just to make the server functional.)

The solution? Greylisting. Suggested by Mr. Meister, once we implemented greylisting, I saw the amount of spam I got in a day go from 140 to 25. (Remember, we turned off SpamAssassin, which probably cut that 140 down a bit, but nowhere near just 25.)

So now we might not even turn SpamAssassin back on. We’ll have to determine if it’s worth the added load to deal with the fairly small amount of spam we get now. But as of today, email is working pretty good around these parts…

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DIY PowerBook Repairs

As PowerBook (and iBook) users know all to well, those damn power adapters can go bad. Well, mine finally got to the point of not working. So for the last few weeks or so I’ve been without the use of pbox, our lovely old PowerBook G3 Wallstreet.

I looked on ebay and at some of the 3rd party suppliers of power adapters, but because I’m what you might call frugal, and a hacker, I took matters into my own hands, and in my own hands I put some tools. Pliers, utility knife, wire cutters, and some duct tape. Ah, there’s always room for duct tape…

So now the power adapter works again. I did managed to lose a tiny resistor in the hackery of it all, but as the saying goes “We got power!” I mean, what could that little resistor be doing anyway? Sure, there is a chance I might get an electrical shock when checking email, or launching Firebird, I mean FireFox, might cause it to burst into flames. Oh well, such is the price you pay for attempting to keep up with the fast pace of technology on a limited budget…

Flaming PowerBook warning label

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Email is broke?

Whew, missed this last week, as I was out, but it seems people think that email is broken, or at least email is somehow having some sort of problem. I wouldn’t really know it if it wasn’t for the hype from everyone else. I’ve had no problem getting my mail. I don’t have a huge increase in spam. I seem to be getting my mail fine, and sending it fine. What’s the problem?

Yeah, I know, I don’t use Windows, and if I did, I’d be using Mozilla products rather than IE and Outlook anyway, but I think the real trick is, I don’t really know people who use those things. Ok, I know people, but obviously I’m not their friend. By that I mean, I don’t seem to be in their Outlook address book, or in their IE cache, or whatever is required by the latest MS flaw-ware that allows Windows to go nuts like a disgruntled postal worker on speed.

I remember a few years back when there was some virus that emailed everyone in your Outlook address book, and at work everyone was getting it except me, due to the fact that either I’m a loser with no friends, or my friends use good software.

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Broken

Good Experience has started something called This Is Broken, which looks at things which are, well, broken. From poorly designed web site to confusing signs, things that just plain don’t work right.

The gas station near my house got new pumps recently, and after using it once, I was able to determine a good number of usability issues that needed addressing. Don’t the companies who design and build these things do any user testing?

Update: The link is broken because they broke it.