Peter's Blog

intellimail (warning: awful flash and music link) is a flashy email program. It is solid and easy to use and lets you choose flashy stationary and graphics but I don't use it any more, I use gmail.

Spamassassin at work is detecting spam nicely, no false positives so far although some false negatives are getting through. I don't have a big enough spam or ham corpus to get the bayesian spam filter running but when I do this could make a difference.

I have created three IMAP folders for spam:

I then have a cron job running each night to run sa-learn --spam on the 'categorically' folder and sa-learn --ham on my inbox. It runs on the 'cur' subfolder but not the 'new' subfolder so it should not pick up spam that arrives when I am not around to approve it.

The Definitely spams are not added to the bayesian filter. I think this is best, it avoids reinforcing prejudices which is not a good thing.

The spam I receive has already been through the companys surfcontrol spam filter. Draw your own conclusions.

Something I must do sometime is extract 250M of old emails from my outlook archive and put them on the IMAP server. I could do this by hooking Outlook up to the IMAP server and just moving the messages but I have a gut feeling that this will take hours and involve a lot of pain.

At home I must figure out a way to get my old email out of the clutches of Intellimail so that I can uninstall it.

I feel the need for a status report on various stuff I've mentioned in this blog.

Palm Tungsten T2

I haven't used this so much recently, I only use it as a diary. This is partly because it is summer and I don't wear a coat with pockets to carry it around. It's too big for trouser pockets. I do my blogging with Python Desktop Server, I don't use DayNotez any more.

Dell Inspiron 500m

I love my notebook, I'm using it now, I'd say it was my primary PC. I sit on the sofa in front of the TV and go through RSS feeds. My main gripe with it is that sometimes when it comes out of hibernate it does not see the wireless network and I have to hibernate it and unhibernate it again to kick it into life. Oh, also the SVideo output is only black and white. The laptop is just nice, no noisy fans and it doesn't make my lap overheat. About 2 hours of battery life.

Desktop PC

Hasn't crashed recently but that may be because I don't use it very often. The only time I used it this week was as a print server. The drivers with the PC TV card might have fixed the PCI latency issues. There are a number of PCs at work, including the firewall PC, that use VIA chipsets and they randomly hang as well. I have no love for VIA.

Python Desktop Server

Use it most days. I use it at work for my engineering logs which are behind a firewall. I haven't got around to adding tools or anything, I mainly use it for RSS aggregation. Having the aggregation in the web browser makes it so convenient for following links: in firefox I middle-click and read in a new tab. As a blogging tool my main gripe is the lack of a preview facility: checking links and formatting before uploading. I have to set it to offline mode before I start composing.

Debian

My debian server is still whirring away (noisy fans this summer but it's in a room I don't go in much). It handles email and Python Desktop Server and is also useful as a squid proxy that I can access from work through an SSH tunnel. I can use this to check the work firewall, to make sure it is possible to get in through the firewall. I might change server to a desktop pc as the laptop is a bit slow (166MHz pentium). That would allow me to make it a headless X server.

Object Desktop

I got fed up with animated fish using my CPU time in DesktopX. I use windowsblinds on the laptop to make it a bit more interesting but I don't think it was worth buying.

Intellimail

Still using it at home but I am tempted to move to IMAP + thunderbird like I use at work. Awaiting a home server decision.

Thunderbird

It's ok if a bit utilitarian when compared to Intellimail. However it handles IMAP, if a little flakily (it sometimes displays Inbox(3) but doesn't show the new messages).

Firefox

Love it. I only use IE for broken websites.

ITunes

May register for it today. If I can buy just the tracks I want and blow them to an audio CD then I see no need to buy CD's that are 75% filler material.

Furl

I'm beginning to see Furl as a place to look for websites that other people find interesting. When I run out of RSS articles I now try, e.g. this.

Motorbike

Sold for the asking price to a dealer who was advertising for CBR600's.

Intellimail has added a spam filter to their email client. It's really a simple white list thing but it's better than nothing. My previous spam filtering solution was SpamBayes but I had to reboot my server and after that SpamBayes refused to start. I could figure out the problem but my inclination is to bin it.

There is an interesting claim in the Intellimail email newsletter (which normally I would regard as spam):

Intellimail has added a spam filter to their email client. It's really a simple white list thing but it's better than nothing. My previous spam filtering solution was SpamBayes but I had to reboot my server and after that SpamBayes refused to start. I could figure out the problem but my inclination is to bin it.

There is an interesting claim in the Intellimail email newsletter (which normally I would regard as spam):

"We're proud to be the first email program in email history to integrate an anti-spam solution completely free of cost to its users."

This is for the version dated 2 June 2004, build 1488.

I think they should qualify this as a commercial email program as Thunderbird already has a much better spam filter. I still find Incredimail a more polished application than Thunderbird. At work I have problems with thunderbird occasionally telling me there are new message available but not listing them. I'd use Incredimail at work but:

• It does not support IMAP

• It add an adveret to every email I send: not very professional.

Thunderbird has also crashed on me a couple of times. I think this is ok when using IMAP and Maildir as I'm less likely to lose my email archives.

This is a clever idea: ASK (http://www.paganini.net/ask/). It is a spam filter that works by responding to mail with a confirmation email. If the sender responds to the confirmation then the email is allowed through. The from addresses in spam are unlikely to be valid so the spammer won't respond. It has white and black list too. Nice, and it is written in Python. Unfortunately it only works with unix stuff like sendmail, procmail and other evil daemonic forces. What I want is something that downloads email from my POP provider and provides a POP like interface to IntelliMail, running under windows. I dunno if sendmail can do this.

1and1 emailed me back saying they had fixed my problem but it was still broken so I bounced the email.

VNC on laptop controlling PC is ok apart from Intellimail not working properly. The floating composition windows that track the main window do not work. Need a way to do email from laptop or PC while saving message threads.

PC hung again, h/w acceleration down to one from bottom. XP fading window effects look poor.

The big news today is that I finally succombed to buying Windows XP. I did this because:

1. It might stop it crashing

2. It might boot faster

3. It's a new toy

4. It might be easier for Bisi to use

5. It miqht be better

6. It's christmas

Installed it over linux on half the disk, leaving Win2k intact, just in case. Installed it like this:

1. Tried running setup from Win2k but it said something about an unsupported upgrade path and kicked me out.

2. Set PC to boot from CD and booted XP disk

3. Set it to install over linux

4. Followed dialogs

5. Activated it

It Just Worked. It had to install 20 minutes worth of updates but it still booted.

Thoughts:

• What's the difference?

• Installed Intellimail and set it. Somehow it found most of the account settings. It is a nice piece of software

• IE6 seemed very quick. Is it because of XP ?

• Installed Mozilla, no time left to play with it

• XP set up all the networking (and everything else). Got to love the simplicity of the networked router.

I created some subfolders on the Intellimail inbox and created message rules to move messages from the different accounts into the folders. Works nicely and resolves my earlier criticism. Outlook Explorer might be able to do this, don't know, don't care.

Something I forgot to mention on thursday (and editing old entries seems like cheating) is that I tried Intellimail. Looks like a good functional email program, virtually an Outlook Express clone but with more tools for creating flashy effects in your messges: fancy backdrops, animated emoticons etc. I will stick with it, the email notifications are good.

I have 4 email accounts on it and, like outlook express, it munges all received mail into one inbox. I would prefer Mozillas way of having a tree with branches for each account. I got fed up with Mozilla because it had touble cancelling it's hourglasses.

ToDo: Investigate www.intellimail.com. May amuse wife for a while.

WebLog thoughts:

• www.blogger.com is free and owned by google

• cannot post via email, I want my DayNotez to appear there, need a mechanism to achieve this.

• Should not stick work related stuff on the net.