Email Oddities

[liadnan]

Odd bit of spam today. Well, I thought it was spam and so did Gmail, but the curious thing was that it was well tailored: for a sort of Librarything/"books you might like" predictor coupled with amazon, sent to my livejournal email and not obfuscated in any way: the English was a little broken but not of the incoherent stream of drivel model. I dithered a bit before hitting delete (rather than unmarking as spam and then hitting delete - does that actually make a difference? I assume gmail's spamfilter learns, and if so that seemed almost... unfair. The really odd thing is that their "taster" book prediction was for something of which I actually am rather fond: Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. Outfit called nearsky.com, if anyone's interested, which whois tells me is, um, owned by an outfit which itself has an .ru domain. Hmm.

I have been arsing around with setting up a local mail server recently, for no particularly good reason other than that I was bored and felt I wanted to understand this stuff a bit more. (a Getmail/Dovecot IMAP /Postfix setup if anyone cares). In the course of doing that and also trying to set up a vpn client to log into work's machines I somehow managed to completely screw up everything that had anything to do with the internet at all: this came as no surprise as I have no real clue what I am doing (it doesn't really matter as I want to do a complete reinstall soon and everything is backed up to the nines). Rather more surprisingly I managed to figure out how I had managed to completely cock it all up and undo it fairly quickly. This pleases me.

In other news, or rather, other rhetorical questions, why does chaos break out in Lebanon every time I am on the brink of buying a flight there?

Comments

[matgb]

I got exact same email, was going to forward it to the list earlier to ask if anyone else had had it. Predicted I'd like two Pratchett books, a Banks and a Scott Card. I own all those books.

But yeah, definitely Russian. Sent to my gmail though, and the spam filter didn't check it, it got to my inbox.

does that actually make a difference? I assume gmail's spamfilter learns

Yes, it does; a few times I've accidentally marked comments as spam instead of archiving them, and wondered why I was missing comments, found them in the spam box; it unlearnt a little slower than it learnt, but it's definitely tailored per person.

[liadnan]

Hmm. My copy of the Alexander is one of the few books I managed to index on librarything before becoming bored* (yes, there is a semblance of alphabetical order to my bookshelves until I reached M and again became bored)... and the livejournal email address is the one registered there.

Actually I've never really seen the point of archiving in gmail. How does it help?

* I have now ordered one of they cuecat thingies.

[matgb]

So it looks like they've simply scraped Librarything content for books you own. Lovely. Ah well, I'll junk it into spam now.

For Gmail, it really does depend how you use it and your inbox, and if you delete stuff much or keep everything (it's very rare I delete anything non-spam, large file size attachments are about it).

Most email from regular sources (egs listmail, LJ and stuff from Jennie and other close friends) has a filter set up to give it a label as it arrives. For some stuff, like Myspace and other lesser sites, it's also set to skip the inbox completely. So when I've read something I don't need to respond to (or clicked the link to get to the LJ page), I just hit archive and it's gone from my inbox.

If I don't have time to respond, I don't archive it. IF it's important and I need to do some digging, I also star it. So my inbox is supposedly stuff that's pending, LJ comments not replied to, stuff I'm working on, etc. Archived stuff is out of the way, but still findable quickly, and labels make it really easy to find stuff quickly.

But from what I've seen, everyone uses Gmail slightly differently, so what works for me doesn't for others. I don't want to ever go back to a desktop client though; all my email comes here currently, and it's set to reply as if it's from the account it was sent to, so only a header check would tell you different; I like that aspect, but odds are a permanent employer would want me to switch to their Outlook server or something *shudders*

[liadnan]

Some mail clients, including thunderbird, do show the relevant information in the short view though. Ie, without looking at full headers, if I send a mail through gmail purporting to be me@somethingelse.com, the ordinary mail view will show From: me@somethingelse.com, Sender: me@gmail.com. I think Outlook/OE does something similar.

I only use gmail's web access when I'm away from my own machine and need to check mail: I like having an archive under my own direct control, but almost everything is left on gmail. Though that now contains half a gigabyte of list mail going back to 1996 thanks to Mark Lyon's GML loader. God that took forever, and it isn't finished yet.

[matgb]

Fair enough; I've not used more recent outlooks, and it's not something I had set to display on Thurnderbird.

As it happens, the reason I switched to gmail was because my own archive died; Thunderbird crashed and lost my profile, I couldn't get to about 70 megs worth of email at all. I switched to gmail as a temporary measure, and haven't looked back. From what I and others have seen aobut the google file architecture, it's a lot more secure and safe with them than it is on any of my machines. I'm guessing at some point reasonably soon we'll be storing virtually everything online somewhere and go back to smaller portable client style machines, but in the meantime, transitions are good.

[itinerantsphinx.livejournal.com]

why does chaos break out in Lebanon every time I am on the brink of buying a flight there?

Well, at least flights will potentially be cheap...

In serious terms, not sure what to say really. The main battle, in Tripoli, is certainly very nasty - however, not sure that the rest of the country is that affected at the time being. Yes there is a bomb threat, but likelihood of getting actually caught up in one is very small in real terms. I guess things might be a bit quieter out and about, and journeys slower (more checkpoints), but life continues...

Of course, the situation can change at any time, and rapidly - but that's always the case anyway...

Good luck in deciding - and be sure to pick your dates carefully, lol.