IMAP as the Proto Personal Cloud
If you have used IMAP to connect an email client to an email server, then you already know the benefits that a personal cloud will provide to you. IMAP and SMTP create an email ecosystem where the user is in control. That's what personal clouds do for other applications.
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Moving Toward a Relationship Network
Would you have your electronic bills delivered by Facebook or Twitter? Not likely. Your bank won't trust them and neither will you. You need a channel that is designed for banking with the right security, privacy, and legal foundations. A standards-based, decentralized, multi-channel relationship network, however, could easily be used for this purpose because the banks and companies delivering bills could define the nature of the channel. They don't have to wait for Facebook to get around to it and then hope they do it right.
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Unsubscribing from Everything
This week, I decided to unsubscribe from (nearly) every maketing email list. I'm shocked at how many I was on. A few observations: In general most of the email marketing systems work pretty well and no one was especially onerous to get off of. Many, however, did make the unsubscribe process unnecessarily confusing. "If you want to unsubscribe, uncheck these three boxes, check the two odd boxes in the next section, and hold your nose while pushing submit." Also, I found that I was on multiple lists from the same organization and usually unsubscribing from one
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EFail, not EMail
Jeff Atwood has a longish post on the problems with email. Of course, the biggest problem with email is there's way too much of it. I used to try to respond to each (non-spam) email I got but now I can't keep up. Unfortunately, I can't let each email commit me to spend time. Jeff references Tantek Çelik's excellent post on the subject and gives three pieces of advice: Channel that private email effort into a public outlet. Discussion boards, blog entries, comments, wikis, you name it. If it can be indexed by a web search
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Thinking About Twitter
JP Rangaswami likes Twitter. What's even better is his analysis of why it adds value to our online life despite its apparent deficiencies (e.g. 140 character limit). Before you dismiss this as just another Twitter fanboy, recall that JP knows a thing or two about enterprise IT. JP hits the nail on the head by discussing Twitter as a pub-sub platform. One of the key features of a pub-sub system is user (client) control of messaging. I choose who I follow on Twitter and thus the messages I receive. I've stopped following people because their tweets weren't very relevant
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Mini Mail is Very Useful
Getting control of email so it doesn't control you, is easier said than done. One of the problems I run into is having the email client open on my desktop all the time. When I'm coding, I frequently just close it all together. Sometimes though I want it open and want to delete things that can be deleted and reply to things that need to be to be replied to and ignore the rest. Mini Mail is an application helper for Mail.app that shows a tiny window with just enough information. The best way to describe it is to
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Encrypting Your Email Address
Via a Wired story on protecting yourself from spam, I found Jim Tucek's Email Protector, a Javascript that let's you embed a mailto: link to your email address on your Web page without actually revealing the email address except to people who run the Javascript. The theory is that email address harvesters don't run Javascript.
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My Mail Is Offline
I haven't received any email all day, so if you've sent me something and are waiting for a response, I probably won't get your email for a while. Seems that windley.com is the subject of a distributed, dictionary email attack--that is a spam botnet is hitting my email server with every email address they can generate from the dictionary in hopes of getting a few through. The effect is an effective denial of service for my email server. The services on the server have been turned off awaiting the zombies to find somewhere else to play. In the meantime,
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EFF Wins 4th Amendment Email Victory
Richi Jennings has a nice wrap-up of reactions to the court ruling that EFF won against warrentless email snooping. Quoting Luke O'Brien: The ruling by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio upheld a lower court ruling that placed a temporary injunction on e-mail searches in a fraud investigation against Steven Warshak, who runs a supplements company best known for a male enhancement product called Enzyte. Warshak hawks Enzyte using "Smiling Bob" ads that have gained some notoriety. The case boiled down to a Fourth Amendment argument, in which Warshak contended that the government overstepped its constitutional
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Stop Forgetting Attachments
Don't you hate when you send an email that should have an attachment and you forget to attach it? I've often wished my mail client could help me remember. I just found a plug-in for Apple's Mail.app mail client that does just that. This plugin from James Eagan scans outgoing email key words like "attached," "attaching," and so on and warns you if there's no attachment. Cool.
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Mark Hurst on Email Productivity (ETech 2006)
Mark Hurst, the creator of GoodExperience.com and ThisIsBroken is speaking on Bit Literacy: A Strategy for Productivity in Your Bit-Drenched Life. Here's what bit literacy means. Mark goes specifically to email to bring the conversation down to nuts and bolts. Mark recommends a rule of getting your inbox count to zero at least once every business day. Here's the method: Find the very most important email in the inbox. Mark believes these are personal emails from family and friends. Spend time reading them and processing them (reply, print, file) and then delete them. Go to the least important messages
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