Recently in Email Category

I read (on Gamespot, via Blue's News) that a visually impaired gamer is suing Sony because its video games aren't 'accessible' enough. He sites examples of games (World of Warcraft) that has plugins with accessiblility features; that's reason to praise the WoW community, but hardly a reason to sue others.

Video games for the blind - what a contradiction in terms that is! The very word video is from the Latin videre, to see, combined with the 'o' as in 'audio'. I don't wish to come across like a rabid Daily Mail-reading reactionary here, but if you can't see, and the game is highly visuals-oriented, then you are pretty much fucked. It's not for you. That's actually not the game publisher's fault, however much one might try to bend the letter of the law to say otherwise. It's noone's fault.

Making computer games for disabled audiences is a great idea, and (since it is a business we're talking about here) it makes really good business sense to do so - it costs tens of millions to make a triple-A video game now, with no guarantee of success. Spending a fraction of the budget on a really, really good audio-based game would almost certainly bring success, along with tremendous positive publicity, and quite possibly a great deal more satisfaction than making a slightly better gorefest or pornographic driving experience.

I can't understand how it feels to be blind, but I know that I don't much like the feeling of someone trying to make their misfortune everyone else's problem. I hope this man's ridiculous case is thrown out of court, and that he goes away and finds a better way than this to deal with his unhappiness.

After a couple of months of transition from hyphen address (previously moaned about here and here) I have turned off the default address for my Google Apps account. No more having to check another account and fixing up web accounts, most of which I never, ever use. It gets really boring, really quickly.

This has another nice side effect: I've had Google Chrome set up to look at the 'spare' account, whilst leaving Firefox to handle my main account. Oddly enough, Chrome is really, really good for Gmail, so I think I would like to start using it in anger. I still miss Adblock Plus and the awesome FoxyProxy too much to have Chrome as my general-purpose browser, but for my Googleverse it's perfect.

 A while ago, I wrote about having to work around the way I used my old email system. In short, I had a lot of email coming to myname-<something> @ ae-35.com delivered to  the mailbox myname @ ae-35.com, using the 'hyphen address' feature that's a function of how Qmail works, and is supported only by Qmail. I've used quite a lot of these hyphen addresses over the years, and the only way I could move to Google Apps whilst still getting those mails was to have everything, regardless of address, delivered to my mail inbox. It's cool that Gmail (and Postini, a service you can have with Google Apps when you pay money) support this 'default address' feature, but it comes at a price as I'll demonstrate shortly.

The solution, as documented, was to set up another mailbox that got the big chunk of everything, and thus keep my own mailbox reasonably pristine. I'd log into the other mailbox periodically and remove the hyphen addresses where I cared, and unsubscribe where I didn't. What I wasn't prepared for was the sheer volume of spam addressed to nonexistent mailboxes.

In Gmail, mail placed in the Spam label (for our purposes a label works kinda like an IMAP folder) is cleared down after 30 days. For the whole time I've been using Gmail, the Spam label on my account (whilst it was the default address) contained between ten and twenty thousand items. That's a lot of spam. This doesn't count the great many mails that Postini blocked or quarantines before Gmail even saw it.

Now that I've removed the default address from my primary account, I have 477 mails in the Spam label.

Of course, the other account now has 20,000 mails in the Spam label. I can only conclude that spammers, in addition to being extremely rude and annoying, are also stupid. The only reason any of it gets through is because I have this legacy migration feature enabled; and that's hardly something most people would ever do. I understand that spammers use other people's resources for their nefarious purposes, but that's no excuse for sloppiness! :-)

Back in the old days, when I ran my own email server on qmail, I used 'hyphen' addresses to identify where spams were coming from, and to make writing filters easier. E.g. bob-facebook@domain.com would end up in bob's mailbox. That's essentially a qmail feature, and Google Apps/gmail and Postini don't support it.

Gmail and Postini do support 'plussed' addresses, bob+facebook@domain.com. That's the Sendmail way of doing things. Annoying, but hardly surprising, that Sendmail and Dan Bernstein don't do things the same way.

Trouble is, I have lots of these 'aliases' set up, and no real database of where they go. So, in order to make it work, I set up the gmail default address to go to my mailbox. That's not great, because it means that all the random shite sent by spammers to nonexistent addresses ends up in my inbox, rather than getting smacked down by Postini.

The level of nonexistent address spam has become unacceptable. I've become used to not getting any spam, so getting ten mails a day to a nonexistent address just isn't good enough. I've added (at cost!) another Apps account to which I direct the default address, so I can figure out which hyphen aliases I'm actually using. Once I've captured the important ones, I'll either change the target email address or add specific aliases in gmail, then turn off the default address feature.

This would be a lot easier to solve if gmail supported wildcard or regex searches. Sigh.