Tagged: email

Not a chance


It is because I keep coming across stories like [[http://www.yepthatsme.com/2005/07/24/apple-mail-in-tiger-can-kiss-it/|this]], that I don’t think I will ever be able to embrace Apple. I just don’t understand — here you have a [[http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail/ | nice email app]] (or so I’ve heard) and email is one of the few things that has been standardized to death on the Internet due to the simple fact that people like to read their email //anywhere, everywhere, all the time//.

So why, oh why does Apple has to go around inventing proprietary formats for storing local mail? Why can’t they use the excellent [[http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html|Maildir]] format, when almost every other email client in the world does it? The excuse that this format is //optimised// for [[http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/|Spotlight]] is bullshit. They brag so much about their API for enabling Spotlight support in applications, then why couldn’t they just write a backend for Maildir files (the way [[http://beaglewiki.org/Main_Page|Beagle]] does!)

Also, apparently this change is new to Tiger, and so old Mac OSX users are affected too. Even if they decided to change the format, is it too much to ask that the software confirms with the user before doing the upgrade, or atleast //informs// the user that something drastic is happening to his/her files? So much for desiging good user interfaces. Sheesh! Why don’t these people ever learn?

Faking from address


As I was setting up my user account at Apache, I ran into a seemingly easy problem. Apache gives us a fowarding account, not a POP/IMAP account. Which is perfectly fine as far as receiving email is concerned. But now I would also like to send email using the apache.org email address as well.

A few years back, this wasn’t a problem at all. SMTP by itself didn’t have (still doesn’t) any notion of security. So you could fake any email address you want in the envelope, and SMTP would happily deliver it for you. However, with the proliferation of spam on the Internet, ISPs and SMTP servers have become very wary of faked from addresses.

What does a fake from address really mean? For most purposes, it simply means that the domain of the from address and the domain that the mail originated in don’t match up. A lot of ISPs only relay mails through their own mail servers (and block port 25 for any other mail servers). Their own mail servers frequently restrict from addresses to be the one that the ISP gave you. A large number of organizations have started using [[http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys|DomainKeys]] or [[http://spf.pobox.com/|SPF]], which makes faking a sender address even harder.

Gmail allows sending messages through their SMTP servers using your gmail account, but no matter what sender address you put in there, it gets substituted by your gmail address. So thats no good is it?

Ideally, I think there should be a decoupling between owenership and authentication. Each email address has a unique owner, multiple email addresses can have the same owner. Then SMTP should authenticate the owner, not the email address. Of course its easier said than done. I’ll think about it a bit more and write something more thought out later on.

Email wars


* Gmail == 1 GB
* Aventure Mail == 2 GB
* Yahoo! Plus == Virtually Unlimited Storage (2 GB)
* Lycos == 1 GB

Thanks to Gmail, a lot of non-Gmail users are also going to be able to enjoy larger storage space for their inboxes. Yahoo! is deploying larger inboxes for both free and premium email members over the summers. A mostly obscure Aventure Mail is offering 2GB for free for the first 10000 customers.

I thought the way people were buying and selling and swapping Gmail accounts was almost ridiculous. I mean, Gmail is so hot simply because it symbolises “cool” — I’m not sure how many people are after Gmail from the point of view of its utility or functionality. But where is all this going to lead? I mean what after 1GB? And how does this impact spam?

With Yahoo’s anti-spam proposal gaining momentum, we’re hoping that the amount of spam will reduce in the future. But it seems to me that more storage for inboxes might also imply more spam as well. Though that relationship is quite obscure, its more like a gut feeling. As Gmail suggests, archive, don’t delete.

Most people I know hate spam because they have to delete the stuff manually. If spam filtering really becomes effective, at what point will spam stop being a PITA, if at all it ever will. If you look at the most popular networking applications through the decades, starting in the 1970′s, you’ll see that email has been a constant contender. And it still remains, and will probably remain for the next decade as well.