Switch

I think this will be the last entry for this journal. I've been fully switched over to AOL mail for a few weeks now, and things are working perfectly. It didn't take me long at all to adjust to the minor differences in how AOL mail works as opposed to my previous IMAP setup.

Many people complain that mail left in the inbox "expires" after a set amount of time. I can understand that. Personally, this has become one of my favorite features. Previously, every couple of months I would go through my inbox (which by then would have 500+ messages in it) and clean out stuff I really didn't need. Now, I don't have to do this. I save the stuff I really care about, delete stuff I really don't care about, and let the rest of it expire on its own. Far more convenient for me.

For the record, if anyone cares, I'm doing all of this with Mail.app on OS X (which I've decided is the best IMAP client for use with AOL mail for many reasons), and occasionally with Outlook Express on Windows.

And it's awesome. Switching to AOL mail was undoubtedly the right thing to do; it has turned out even better than I expected. Thank you, AOL mail team, and thanks to everyone who cared to read this.


kocik01 at 9:50:53 AM EDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 1 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

I have to confess a dirty little secret here: I've been using GMail for my personal mail for a couple of years now. I have one of those accounts that dates back to the days when you had to know someone to get in, and everyone got only a few invites to hand out.

GMail's spam filtering has always been top-notch. Every once in a blue moon I'd get a false positive (probably 10 messages over 2 years), but it never missed an actual piece of spam. My inbox remained blissfully spam-free all this time.

Until now, that is. For the past few weeks, it seems every time I check my mail there, I have at least one piece of spam -- sometimes well-disguised, but sometimes blatantly obvious -- in my inbox. I don't know what's gone wrong, but it just isn't working the way it used to. It's still not bad, but it's disappointing that GMail's near-100% success rate is faltering.

Meanwhile, the spam filtering on my AOL account has been incredible. A few years ago, when I was using an AOL account for my personal mail, spam blocking seemed to have about a 50% success rate at best. I spent a lot of time in my inbox with AOL Communicator selecting messages and clicking on the "Report Spam" button. But lately, AOL's filters have been batting 1000. I have not seen a single piece of spam hit my inbox, though I've seen plenty of the stuff wind up in the spam folder where it belongs. And early on there were a couple of false positives, but I only had to tell the system about these messages once, and since then messages from the same senders and with the same or similar content have not been filtered. This is no doubt due to how the AOL mail system populates your address book from messages you tell it are not spam, which it then uses as a whitelist.

I'm not giving up on GMail just yet, but if this trend continues I think I'll be switching my personal mail over to a free AIM mail account. Or maybe I'll ressurect the SN I haven't been using in a long time. There's hardly a good reason not to, outside of the simple fact that all of my friends and family (plus a ton of web sites and companies I do business with) know me by my GMail address. That's really the only reason these days, and I think that's outstanding.

Point: AOL.


kocik01 at 10:31:36 AM EDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

So the other day Thunderbird starting performing a new trick. Every time I logged in to check mail, it would re-challenge me to authenticate several times in a row as if I'd given an invalid password. As is my habit, I sent a message to a mailing list seeking help, only to be mildly embarrassed later on when I found out this was my own fault -- and after I had publicly chastised T-Bird for this new behavior.

As someone on the list pointed out, this will happen if you configure your IMAP client to check multiple folders for new mail. I had done exactly that. I set T-Bird to check my Spam folder, and a couple of my other folders for new mail when it did a mail check. Once I undid that, the behavior went away.

So now I know, and so do you. And you didn't even have to publicly embarrass yourself to find out. You're welcome.


kocik01 at 10:20:47 AM EDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

Here it is Thursday, and I haven't had anything to say here since Monday. That's partially because I've actually been busy this week for a change, and partially because of something else.

I haven't noticed my mail.

That's a good thing. I haven't had much to say because I haven't really been paying a lot of attention to my mail setup, and I haven't been paying a lot of attention to it because it hasn't needed me to. It's staying out of my way, and just doing what mail setups do. It hasn't been intrusive, or needed my attention in any way. It's just working.

What more could I want?


kocik01 at 7:32:46 AM EDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

You know what's cool? I can check my mail without first signing on to a VPN. I can check my mail without even having to use one of my own computers. I can be at someone else's house, check my mail. At the airport (not that I go anywhere), check my mail. Find a kiosk somewhere, check my mail.

I like mail. Well, the digital kind. The paper kind has too many bills in it.

I'm Bill, and I like mail. There, I said it.


kocik01 at 8:27:48 AM EDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 2 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

Did you know if you drag a message from your Inbox into your Spam folder with your IMAP client the mail system reports the message as spam, and the spam-blocking part of the whole outfit learns from this?

Did you also know that if you drag a message that isn't spam out of your Spam folder that this is reported, too? The spam-blocking system learns that you considered that message to be valid, and the sender is automatically added to your AOL address book so their messages don't get marked as spam in the future.

Cool, huh? I thought so.


kocik01 at 6:10:40 AM EDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

Okay, so it hasn't been quite a full work week, but I don't think I'll have time to write this entry later today or tomorrow, so I'm getting it in now.

I have to say, this is going well. I've learned quite a bit about how the AOL mail system really works, and aside from problems I've caused myself or disappointments in how Thunderbird works, I haven't really had any issues. I've had to make a few adjustments in how I think about email, but so far it looks like I was right -- this was the right thing to do, and I'm glad I'm doing it.

I also have to give a big hats-off to the AOL mail team here. They've answered every question I've had along the way so far in great detail, and very quickly, and I'm sure these folks have much more important things to do than entertain me.

One need only talk to them a little bit to quickly realize how good they are at what they do. I know it's popular for mail system administrators at large to cast dispersions on AOL's mail system and those in charge of it, but I think the truth is that most of the AOL mail team has forgotten more about processing email than most other mail admins will ever know. These guys are smart. Really smart. It's obvious to me that I've left the care and feeding of my mail in the most capable hands possible.

So, thank you to them.


kocik01 at 6:04:40 AM EDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

Not as smart as I thought, I mean. I've noted that I'd set up a clever Procmail recipe to automatically forward and respond to my incoming mail on my old address, provided the mail wasn't from or to a mailing list.

Raise your hand if you've ever heard the phrase "mail loop".

Yeah. I created one somehow. I haven't really analyzed how it happened (and I don't really care to), but it has something to do with having received a message with a blank "From:" field. The auto-responder tried to reply, the message bounced, the auto-responder tried to reply to that, it bounced, and so on and so on. End result: I had several hundred thousand daemon-generated messages in my mail queue. Several thousand of them actually got delivered to my aol.com account, filling up my mailbox, and causing me to be automatically unsubscribed from a couple of mailing lists (because the list server detected it couldn't send me mail anymore).

Remember how I said I'd rather have people more competent than me in charge of my mail? This is why.

Woops.


kocik01 at 7:30:41 AM EDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

I mentioned in another post that I had solved the issue of Mail.app not recognizing my "Sent Items" folder as a collection of sent messages by changing the columns displayed there (to show "To" instead of "From"), and setting a rule to mark all messages from myself as read. Turns out this didn't work out for two reasons:

1. Mail.app applied the changes I'd made to the shown fields to all folders, not just the one I meant. Apparently you can't show custom columns on a per-folder basis.

2. It also does not apply rules to messages in folders other than Inbox, so my sent items are not automatically being marked as read.

Unspiffy. I think I'll see if Thunderbird can do a better job of this or not. But Thunderbird means giving up my Mail.app's tight integration with my OS X address book. Also unspiffy.

Update: I imported my address book into T-Bird using this hint. It doesn't give me full integration (which means no .Mac syncing), but it's a start. T-Bird also not only already knew to show the "To" field rather than "From" in my Sent Items folder (not sure how it knew, but it did), but it also let me define a rule that runs on that folder only, and flawlessly marks my sent mail as read. Very spiffy.

I like the word spiffy. You should use it, too.

Update: It turns out that rule doesn't apply to the mailbox I thought (that drop down only applies to the "Run now" button), and it doesn't work. Guess it's back to the drawing board.



kocik01 at 9:18:50 AM EDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

Houston, we have a problem. I think.

I set up procmail on my old IMAP server to do three things with all of my inbound messages.

1. Check to see if it came from, or was going to, a mailing list.

2. If it wasn't, respond to it with a message notifying the user of my new email address.

3. Either way, forward it on to my new address.

This seems to mostly work. But there is at least one message I know of that was sent to my old address by a friend as a test which seems to have disappeared into some void. My mail logs show it coming into my server, going through procmail (which sent the auto-response correctly), and on it's way out being accepted for delivery by the aol.com servers to my new address.

There's just one problem: It never showed up. It's not in any of my folders, including the spam folder. It just vanished. There may be more of these, but this is the only one I'm absolutely sure passed through my system correctly, got to the aol.com mail server(s), and disappeared.

So now I've changed my procmail rule to do one more thing:

4. Leave a copy of the message on my IMAP server, just in case.

Update: It seems this message was most likely actually lost in the hands of an intermediate server, NOT the aol.com email servers. I've set my mail server up to stop using the intermediate, and I have not seen this occur since.


kocik01 at 8:04:55 PM EDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 1 comments: Show Recent | Add your own