Gmail Makes Another Step

I’ve whined previously about gmail’s “conversation view”, claiming that it’s too broken to use for non-trivial email. Recently, I was pleased to discover that Google have finally—albeit reluctantly—acceded to the requests of thousands of users who don’t want it. It can now be turned off. I have turned it off for me and my wife and we both prefer it to the old gmail way.

Of course, gmail is still broken in that the non-conversation view is less useful than what was provided a dozen or more years back by software like exmh or mutt. But at least we can avoid Google’s peculiarly inept idea of email threading. There is still room for improvement, but I’m finding the low level of maintenance of gmail to be a compelling reason to stick with it. For now.

Gmail Priority Inbox

After wrestling with various Gmail extensions with similar aims, I was pleased to hear about the new Gmail Priority Inbox which I have now turned on for my Gmail. I don't think they have it quite right yet, but I expect it will evolve over the next few months and that it might just become so useful that I end up feeling that I did the right thing moving all my email to Gmail.

I’d be interested to see what other people think about this feature as they try it out.

Gmail Spam Detection Is Good Enough

In the past 30 days, Gmail has successfully tagged 8712 spams with a mere handful of false positives (which have now been flagged) and only three false negatives. I'm happy that this is good enough for me—as of now I will no longer review the spam folder.

If you email me and get no response at all and think you should have got a response, this may be a result of your message being flagged as spam. In that case, feel free to follow the advice in the Contact tab of this blog.

In Which I Yield to Powerful Forces

As long ago as it was possible, I began running my own mail servers. Over the years, I employed a variety of software and hardware and for the past decade or more I've had to run antispam software as well. I did it partly to avoid the alternatives (which were pretty unsatisfactory in the early days) and partly to understand the process in case clients needed help with their mail servers.

Happily, I am now without clients. And the alternatives might not be so bad. But I am stubborn, so I decided to solve my most recent problem by setting up some new software on a VM in the USA. The problem I was solving was the increasing unreliability of my ADSL connection—not through any fault of my excellent ISP, but because Telstra appears to have a policy of letting the copper infrastructure decay sufficiently that any successor won't be at all glad to be saddled with it. At any rate, there have been no spare pairs in my street since we got the last pair five years ago. Since then, we've had line faults after every heavy rain and it takes between three and seven days to fix things, where "fix" means find the wet joint, dry it out, patch it up and say "she'll be right now mate."

So I looked at all-in-one solutions for email, in the mistaken belief that there would be something out there that I could more or less just drop into place on a VM, do a bit of DNS magic and sit back happily. I looked at Horde, Zimbra, Zarafa, Courier and a couple of others whose names escape me now. They probably are all capable of doing the job, but all require a great deal of dedicated setup and they look as though they need a fair bit of care and feeding once they are operational. None of them looked like what I wanted and I started thinking that if these were the answer to my question, I must have asked the wrong question.

So I considered Google. I've had a bunch of gmail accounts ever since it was launched. I don't particularly like it, although that's mainly just me. And, for various reasons which I can't talk about here, plain gmail accounts don't work for much of the email I have to provide. But Google Apps offer a bit more than just gmail, so I thought I'd spend a little bit of time investigating. I gave myself a maximum of one day to complete this and in fact needed much less. I now have all email addressed to my 11 operational domains going to Google Apps accounts for me and my wife. Nobody has to change the email addresses they use, and the outgoing email looks as though it still comes from where it always did.

And Google's antispam stuff is awesome. So far, we've had a few thousand emails arrive and every spam has been caught without a single false positive. It's so good that I'm going to stop checking the spam folders now. This is so simple that it's a total no-brainer for me. The only possible downside is storing our email with Google, but that is easy to fix via their nice API that allows you to download it all for storage wherever you like.

Well, the other possible downside is that my wife might spit the dummy when she returns from seven weeks in Europe on Monday and discovers that she is not using exmh any more. But it will be too late and I hope it won't end in tears. At least she has been using one of the ordinary gmail accounts every day while she's been away, so she is familiar with how it works.