Web

I’m starting to get really disgusted with Gmail and I’m almost ready to give up on it. Their spam filter has become a lot less effective lately and seems to have stopped learning when I use ‘report spam’. This morning I found *FIVE* spams in my inbox, all telling me that I won something. I’ve seen those same spams before and I reported them multiple times, yet Gmail’s filter still hasn’t learned that they’re spam.

I’m drowning in spam. I get over 200 a day, most of which do end up in the spam mailbox, but those 5-10 that end up in my inbox every day are especially annoying. If it continues, I will stop using gmail since it’s starting to be more of an annoyance than useful. I prefer using their web interface rather than Mail.app, which is the only reason I continue to use it.

I find that Gmail’s spam filters are becoming much less effective. Lately more and more spams get past the filter. This morning I found 11 turds in my inbox. I get over 200 spams a day, so I usually empty my junk folder more than once a day. Occasionally I’ll check the first page for false positives, but I haven’t seen any in more than a month.

With the volume of spam, I really wish they’d block the most obvious spam at the server, so it won’t even appear in the junk folder. In fact I’m now doing that on my dreamhost mailbox using their SpamAssassin with some of the settings tweaked and some extra procmail filtering. Right now my spam filtering on dreamhost is a lot more effective, since most of the spams are redirected to a dedicated spam-catcher account before I even see them. I really like Gmail’s web interface and their mobile app, otherwise I’d just forward my gmail to the dreamhost account so I can filter it there.

Flickr users are up in arms over their announced login change to using Yahoo IDs. (articles at ars technica, ZDNet, Slashdot)

I call bullshit on this. Most of the outrage seems to have been stirred up by Thomas Hawk, who happens to be the CEO of Flickr’s major competitor.

The change has absolutely no visible effect. I switched to using my Yahoo ID long ago and it didn’t affect anything. You don’t even have to use a Yahoo email address – I still use my gmail address. My visible user name & photo URL remains the same. It didn’t affect my pro status. You’re the only one who knows that you’re logging in with a Yahoo ID – everyone else sees exactly the same thing they saw when you logged in with a Flickr ID. It simply means I have one less password to remember.

Sudden Surge

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

According to FeedBurner, the number of subscribers to MacMegasite’s feed suddenly jumped from 10069 Thursday to 14743 Friday.

As my next step in moving off the desktop, I’m now trying the Performancing blog editor in Firefox instead of a stand-alone application.

After Scoble & others raved about it, I tried Google Reader today and fell in love with it immediately. I’m now using it as my news reader instead of NetNewsWire. I’ve already switched to Gmail as my primary email.

I’m starting to like the idea of using web-based rather than desktop applications, so I can read my email & newsfeeds from any computer and even from my cell phone without syncing.

For a few days now I’ve been using Gmail as my primary email, rather than my Dreamhost IMAP mailbox. I have email addresses for each of my domains, plus individual throw-away addresses for shopping at different sites. Until now they were all forwarded to my Dreamhost mailbox, but I changed them to forward to Gmail instead.

The main reason was that it was too much of a pain to sync my email between Leopard and my default OS and between my MacBook Pro and my iMac with Mail.app, but I find that I’m starting to prefer Gmail’s web interface. I use Google Notifier and keep gmail open at all times, so it’s just as quick & convenient as Mail.app. I can now access my email from my Macs or Linux without syncing.

bbPress is new forum software from the creators of WordPress, which they’ve been using all along for their own forums. It looks very interesting, much nicer than either phpBB or Drupal’s forum module.