Peter's Blog

I'm back to using Outlook for two reasons:

• the journal feature may be useable as a desktop notetaking tool. Being integrated into the email program means fewer apps running and a leaner and meaner system (ha). It does look like a half decent note taking tool, entries can be formatted, pictures pasted in etc.
• was reading how hackers can carry packet sniffers on memory keys and became paranoid about my unencrypted password floating around the ether(net). I looked into setting up ssl authentication on the exchange server but it involves messing around setting up an ssl certificate server and I couldn't be bothered.

I've given up on using folders to categorise my email: I leave it all in the inbox and rely in searching to find stuff. I have google desktop search to speed this up but that still thinks I am still using thunderbird and tries using that to display messages. How to persuade it I have vaccilated back to the evil ones?

I finally got around to setting up my signature in Thunderbird. To set up the signature you have to:

• Create a signature file. This is a straight text file containing your name, some interesting ascii art, a quote that makes you sound learned and a warning that for legal reasons, nobody should ever read your email.
• Open Tools/Account Settings/Manage Identities../Edit../Settings and click the 'Attach this signature' box.
• Click 'Choose' and navigate to your signature file.

When it comes to email I'm a top poster: life's too short to spend scrolling down email messages. If you top post you want your signature at the top of the message, not the bottom where nobody will read it. On the 'Composition & Addressing' tab there is a control to tell it to 'start my reply above the quote' and another to place my signature 'below my reply (above the quote)'. If you choose this option and save the settings and then reopen the settings again the signature is set to 'below the quote (recommended)': looks like a bug in Thunderbird 1.5.0 (or some evil microsoft loving, emacs using, big-endian favouring bottom poster has deliberately broken it).

To get top posting to work correctly you have to go into the file

C:\Documents and Settings\{windows username}\
   Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\
   {random letters}\prefs.js

and change the line that says:

user_pref("mail.identity.id1.sig_bottom", false);

to say

user_pref("mail.identity.id1.sig_bottom", true);

I am back with Google Desktop Search. I was using MSN desktop search but I got tired of it not shutting down with the computer. I have moaned about GDS in the past, particularly that I don't like the idea of results appearing in a web browser because the only thing you can do is open them, you don't have Windows Explorer's right-click context menu. After months of using MSN search I have decided that this is not a big deal: on the whole I can remember where things are and I use salamander to access them, I only use search when I have lost something.

GDS integrates better with thunderbird than MSN search did: I installed an MSN thunderbird plugin but it never worked. GDS supports it out-of-the-box, although as I use IMAP it will only index the messages I actually open, not the 2400 messages in my archives (unless I view them all one at a time).

I have come to appreciate the various plugins available for the GDS sidebar, especially the email preview thing: in fact I find myself reading email on that rather than switching to thunderbird. There are many plugins available but their installation programs often seem excessively large (megabytes) for something that is hosted by another application and appears in a window two inches square.

I have stopped using Opera for now: it's mail reader was not showing me the contents of some messages so I abandoned it. Some emails can crash it and it is still not as compatible with web sites as firefox. It has got me hooked on gestures and I find myself gesturing in FireFox to no avail (except at microsoft.com). I have installed a gesture extension and am hoping the next point release of firefox doesn't break it.

I'm trying the Opera 9 preview as an alternative (or complement) to Firefox. Opera has been attractive to me in the past but always gave odd rendering problems or crashes that put me off. This version has been ok thus far and has features built in that are quite seductive. Ok firefox has extensions but these all seem to break every time they upgrade it and I have got fed up with reinstalling them (too high maintenance).

Opera goodies, some maybe all available as Firefox extensions but are bundled with opera:

• Fast Forward: this button seems to find the 'next' link on your page and clicks it for you. You can go through google results very quickly.
• gestures: right click and move the cursor around to control the browser: e.g. right click and move right does the fast forward action so takes you to the next page with no fuss and minimal physical effort.
• email client: this supports IMAP and works with Microsoft Exchange. It chucks all email in one folder and gives lots of options for searching through it. For example, you click on a contact name and see all the mail from that contact. Looks ok so far and is appealing as the memory footprint of Opera should be less than Firefox + Thunderbird. Only downside so far: cannot compose html email. Not a showstopper as I rarely bother to format email (like I rarely bother to format blog postings) and it does display html email (as a web browser should be able to).
• It supports widgets if you have a need for a huge clock that cannot be resized. There are only 9 of them so far (clock, calculator, calendar etc).

Possibly more cool: Opera Mini. This is a version of Opera written in Java so it works on my Sony-Ericsson K750i phone. This is a proper web browser, it supports http/html, it is not a crippled WAP thing so you can look at real web sites. It displays them in a tiny font that gets a lot of info on the screen. It communicates with a server at Opera which compresses the pages you are viewing and minimises the download: the front page of this site was a 8k! I installed it thusly:

• Download the .jar and .jad files for the k750i.
• Connect phone to USB
• Copy files to \MSSEMC\Media files\other
• Unplug phone (stopping USB devices on Windows 2000, not necessary on XP).
• On phone, go to 'My Items', Other.
• Select the .jar file, right click and Install. It will ask you if you want it installed as an Application or Game: you decide.
• For uk vodafone, go to Settings/Connectivity/Internet Settings/Internet Profiles and create a new profile. Give it any name and set the 'Connect Using' field to 'Contract Internet'.
• Go to Settings/Connectivity/Internet Settings/Settings for Java(tm) and select here the new profile you created above.
• Go to My Items/Applications (or Games) and select Opera Mini. It will do a connectivity test. If it fails the internet profile for java above might be wrong.
• Enjoy

Been having problems with MSN Search Toolbar: it would throw up a few message boxes saying:

The ordinal 49 could not be located in the dynamic link library MAPI32.dll

and then the search would stop working.

I had a look in \winnt\system32 at the Mapi32.dll and found something odd:

• there was a file there called Mapi32_moz_bak.dll which was 892688 bytes long
• Mapi32.dll was only 4608 bytes long.

I renamed Mapi32.dll to Mapi32 broken.dll and renamed Mapi32_moz_bak.dll to Mapi32.dll and the toolbar was ok again.

I booted thunderbird (portable version, which may be significant) and it complained about not being the default email application. I set it to be default email application and it immediately broke mapi32.dll again.

Googled and found this article which says that indeed thunderbird fiddles with the Mapi32.dll file if it is made the default email application. It excuses itself by saying that this is how Microsoft designed it.

Conclusion: Microsoft's fault, either the dodgy design or the calculated attempt to stop people using thunderbird.

I finally snapped and started using thunderbird email filters. I have avoided this as experience with Outlook taught me that they were just a pain. Outlook (98?) used to randomly disable them for no apparent reason and I'd have to monitor them all the time. I think I managed to upgrade from the version of outlook that loaded new email messages before it loaded the filters, meaning the mail waiting before outlook was started up was not filtered.

I am getting dozens of virus notifications a day so I decided to create a Thunderbird filter to store them away somewhere. The filter settings in thunderbird allow you to mark a message as already read and, take this microsoft, THE TASKBAR NOTIFIER DOES NOT TRIGGER. No being hastled and having to restart Outlook to get rid of the notifier icon! The filter has been running for a day and so far no sign of it silently being disabled.

I have given up on the thunderbird junk filter as an email classifier for this kind of thing: it just does not learn that {Isolated} in a header means I couldn't care less (other people here deal with that). Real spam is handled elsewhere, the notifications from the spam filter are my spam.

Using another PC at work and getting tired of Microsoft Exchange Web Access, a pretty poor web email application. What to do?

Put Portable Thunderbird on a Freecom USB hard disk and carry that around the building. I would use a flash drive but I would have to use my own and I don't want it performing excessive writes and using up the flashes erase cycles. I am using IMAP and keeping all the messages on the server but I don't want to take any chances. Portable Firefox does try to limit writes to flash.

The USB hard drive does appear to make the other PC I am using take about two minutes longer to boot which is more time to make coffee.

I copied the profile directory from my static thunderbird install to the portable one and it all seems to work fine.

I seem to get a lot of people visiting this site looking at how to use thunderbird with Exchange. I don't think I ever described it in detail as I found it quite easy. I just enabled an IMAP service on the exchange server and I connect to that from Thunderbird using the standard procedure (username/password). IMAP has the advantage of keeping all the messages on the server so it is someone elses problem to back them up. Also searching through messages seems to work much faster as the server is good at that kind of thing and Microsofts local message archive format, the .pst file, is pretty poor. It is probably just as easy to set up POP3. Email is sent using authenticated smtp so I am prompted for username/password to send messages.

With this setup I don't get shared calendars or any other executive gimmicks but I don't use them anyway.

Sorry if this suggestion seems inane but as far as I know this is the only way this can be done.

Taking over someone else's pc I decided to install Google Desktop Search again as a new version had just come out. It still has some of the problems I had with it last time, mainly that by showing the results in a web browser you are pretty limited in your options: you can open it, you can open the folder it is in but if you right click you don't get a comprehensive context menu as in windows explorer (or Microsoft's Desktop Search). What I miss here is the choice of editing python scripts or running them.

The google thing does have a new sidebar to display rss feeds and stuff on your desktop all the time but I'm not sure I really need that kind of thing always there at a glance. When my boss buys me a 22" widescreen monitor I'll reserve the right 2" for google.

I installed it on my own work pc but after a while it annoyed me again: if I leave the pc long enough gds seems to gobble up all available memory, pushing everything else out to swap. I then have to wait a couple of minutes for everything to get swapped back in. The other pc I was using had win2k and 512Megs of ram, mine has Windows XP in 256M and swaps a lot anyway.

I tried blinkx as the 'smart folders' feature looked a bit like thunderbird stored searches for files instead of email messages. However, I was disapointed that the folder view again only gave the 'open' option, no context menu. Apart from this the interface was kinda annoying, tiny fonts, didn't index source code, mixed search results with obscure web search results from blogs, couldn't index thunderbird (as gds can), I uninstalled it in less than half an hour.

Maybe the latest Microsoft search thing will shutdown with windows without hanging? If there is an extension for it to handle thunderbird I might go back to that.

I've discovered Thunderbird saved searches. They allow me to create items in the tree thing on the left that act like folders full of messages that meet certain search characteristics. For example, I can have an item called 'fred' containing all messages from 'fred'. Previously to do this I would create a folder and get my filtering rules to try to shuffle incoming messages into the right folder. In outlook this was always flaky, in thunderbird I've never bothered. Saved searches are much easier to set up and have the advantage that if you change the search terms then the changes are applied immediately, you don't have to run all your messages through filtering rules again. Also messages can meet more than one search pattern: I could have a search for everyone in project X and I could also have searches for specific people in project X: the same messages could appear in both.

It's working nicely with Microsoft Exchange via IMAP: the searches occur instantly, no real overhead. This may be because the IMAP is offloading the search to the server. If the search was done locally I doubt that it would be so transparent.

Hum, as a concept these stored searches could be considered an alternative to tagging. Instead of manually having to mark an article as being about, say, ubuntu, the stored search would automatically search for the word ubuntu in the article and list the matches. It is more fiddly to create a search than a tag but they would require less maintenance. Tagging does give the possibility of structuring articles. Something else to think about.

Servant Salamander: coming to rely on this. Pretty much destined to register it. Today I discovered that I can get it to calculate space used in subdirectorys and then send a report of directory names and sizes, sorted by size, to the clipboard. Try doing that with Windows Explorer. I've stopped using filezilla, Salamander is a useful sftp client. Things I do wish it could do:

• copy directly from one sftp site to another. Similarly, since you can browse straight into a zip or tgz file, it would be nice to be able to copy a file from within an archive on one window to other window showing an sftp site. The user interface spoils you, you start thinking these things are possible, you try them and are thwarted.
• create tar.gz files. I have actually learned the incantation for this, I am becoming such a command line junkie:

  tar cvfz blah *
  

  It can do zips and rars and stuff.
• It sometimes goes a bit crazy with the confirmation dialogs, sometimes giving two or three in a row. I don't have faith enough to disable them, combining them into one dialog would be nice (e.g. yes I want to copy, I want to copy it there, I want to overwrite everything).

Thunderbird: since I fixed the exchange server I have been using this instead of outlook and have not looked back. I use an IMAP connection to the Exchange server and it is working just fine. I used to have problems with it when my network connection was flakier (it kept asking me for my password) but since I installed XP on my pc the network has been ok (one of those software decay things on my old Win2k install). I think outlook was tainted by spambayes which was pretty lethargic in moving spam around (to get around outlook's flaky message filtering it does lots of sleeps to keep out of the way). So you go to look at a message and find that spambayes is still in the process of moving it to the junk folder. Thunderbirds integrated bayesian spam filter is working for me. Another thing I like about thunderbird, the flag thing that pops up and goes away again when new mail arrives. The outlook taskbar thing always used to get stuck on, even after deleting new messages, to the extent that I disabled it.

I wanted to get the POP and IMAP services on our Exchange 2003 server running so:

• I could use Thunderbird (or at least had the choice)
• Folks could potentially look at their email from their mobile phones.

Clicking on the 'POP3' service in the Exchange manager gave the useless error 'The server is not operational'. Googling for this implied a DNS problem so I looked in the event log and found a number of instances of error event 5789. The details of this were:

Attempt to update DNS Host Name of the computer object in Active Directory failed.
The updated value was 'server.work.co.uk'. The following error occurred:

The parameter is incorrect.

Searching for event 5789 gave this MS knowledge base article. Aparently this error is due to the DNS domain name being different to the Active Directory Domain Name. In the case here, the DNS domain name of the exchange box should have been domain_name.work.co.uk, not work.co.uk. I fixed this in Control Panel/System/Network Identification and did the mandatory reboot.

When it came up, life was sweet, existing POP3 and IMAP services were reborn and Thunderbird is working nicely.

Moral: Never ever assume that working with Microsoft Exchange is easy.

MSN Desktop search is changing my way of working: now I can find .exe files I don't spend my time clicking around in Windows Explorer finding things, I just use the desktop search bar.

This has lead me back to Outlook as an email client so I can search email. I've done the following:

• set Outlook up to talk directly to the in-house exchange server.
• set it to leave messages on the server: why waste my disk space?
• installed SpamBayes, a glorious free spam filter written in python. It integrates very well.
• got Desktop Search to index my email.

Desktop Search was reluctant to index the email and I had to read the small print in the help file. Apart from setting Outlook as the default email client I had to delete the registry key:

HKCU\Software\Clients\Mail

like it says as that was set to thunderbird.

Now, why do I have to keep typing my password in whenever Outlook boots? It's the same as my domain password. Whatever happened to single login? Thanks Microsoft, I was in danger of having nothing to criticise you for.

Yesterday:

FireFox

decided to show me profile manager and refuses to let me open my old profile. Have to start new profile from scratch, installing extensions etc

ThunderBird

not connecting to IMAP server: waits forever and doesn't time out

Some of our email servers at work have ceased to be so I am having to send email via a Microsoft Exchange server, using Thunderbird as a client as I despise Outlook.

I was having problems sending mail outside the company: I'd get an error telling me that it couldn't relay messages. I fixed this by telling it to authenticate my login to the Exchange SMTP server.

Trying to emerge today after emerge-webrsync yesterday and getting this:

root@ad-pc root # emerge --pretend griffle

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

!!! ARCH is not set... Are you missing the /etc/make.profile symlink?
!!! Is the symlink correct? Is your portage tree complete?

I'm fed up with Gentoo, it needs constant nursing and things randomly break. The printer driver died a few weeks ago and none of my kicking has brought it back to life. Ok, it is a high maintenance hackers distribution and I am admitting defeat, I want a lamers out-of-the-box working system.

When/if I get the time I'm changing distribution. I want a fast, compact X-less server system. I'll probably go to Debian Sarge as I liked apt.

Gentoo annoyances:

• Having to build everything means if you want something you might get it tomorrow if the build doesn't break
• env-update/etc-update and studying diffs in config files is error prone and tedious
• emerge generates huge amounts of logging. If I do it in an at job the output emails cause timeouts in squirrelmail and thunderbird takes a few minutes to display them.

Now I think about it, I abandoned SUSE because of the poor rpm support and SUSE's sloooow servers meant I had to build everything.

Today I realised that I could use mozex and vim to edit email. I tried this with gmail and it went into a weird endless loop until I killed firefox. So I had a more serious try at using squirrelmail on my local imap server. Using gmail as a client had been bothering me as it's more of a black hole than outlook: how could I ever get my email archives back?

Running through email client alternatives:

Outlook

Big slow lumbering, much loved by ignorant phb's. Message filtering rules randomly disable themselves and cannot be relied upon. Taskbar indicator says messages are waiting even if filters mark them as read.

Thunderbird

Feels like a poor clone of outlook express. Whenever it can't connect to the imap server it decides it is because the password is wrong and I have to enter it again. Getting on my nerves.

Eudora

it only seems to last for about 5 minutes whenever I install it. I think 'so what' and delete it.

mutt

user interface design from the 1970's.

gmail

insists on putting signatures at bottom of replies, annoying for a top-poster like me. No way to get at archives apart from forwarding them all to self. Taskbar notifier either flaky or very sensitive detector of flaky networks. Notifier prompts me for user name and password whenever the pc boots. Both are already filled in I only have to press OK so it's not a security feature just an annoyance.

Squirrelmail

web-based, a little simplistic but not as simplistic as horder or neomail.

I have yet to find a truly lovable email client.

Decided my email setup was still not complex enough so I bought a trendy Gmail invite on ebay for £1.30 (a bargain for a new toy) and set up my server to forward all mail to it. This way I can try gmail out while still archiving messages safely at home. I did this by putting the following in the exim .forward file:

 unseen deliver <blah>@gmail.com 

This forwards everything but keeps handling the messages on the server.

GMail so far seems neat. Observations:

• Runs quite fast, subjectively faster than Thunderbird, dovecot etc.

• Cannot compose html email

• I sent an email to a friend who replied. I replied to the reply and Gmail bounced with this cryptic error:

   Technical details of failure: PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 13): 550 Relay not permitted - (ACL violation) 

  Like a lot of email server error messages, this is a little lacking in detail. Which server was trying to relay and why?

• Gives very nice threaded presentation of messages. Would be great if I could reply to replies.

After 5 days away I checked my email and was shocked to find absolutely none. Very odd. After a mild panic I worked out that procmail had diligently filtered my email into the correct mail folders but Thunderbird was only set up to poll the inbox folder. To get Thunderbird to check subdirectories for new email you have to set the properties for each folder and enable 'check this folder for new messages'. Hopefully in a new version they will add a default action to check all folders.

Spamassassin seems to be doing a good job with the spam filtering. Out of 8 spams, no false positives, 7 had been tagged by pyzor, the remaining spam had lots of silly defects:

 4.2 MIME_BOUND_DD_DIGITS   Spam tool pattern in MIME boundary 3.1 MSGID_SPAM_CAPS        Spam tool Message-Id: (caps variant) 0.1 MIME_HTML_ONLY         BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts 0.7 MIME_HTML_NO_CHARSET   RAW: Message text in HTML without charset 1.2 MISSING_MIMEOLE        Message has X-MSMail-Priority, but no X-MimeOLE 0.0 FORGED_AOL_TAGS        AOL mailers can't send HTML in this format 3.9 RCVD_DOUBLE_IP_SPAM    Bulk email fingerprint (double IP) found 1.7 HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG  HTML-only message, but there is no HTML tag 4.3 FORGED_MUA_AOL_FROM    Forged mail pretending to be from AOL (by From) 1.8 FORGED_AOL_HTML        AOL can't send HTML message only 1.1 MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI   Multipart message only has text/html MIME parts 0.1 MISSING_OUTLOOK_NAME   Message looks like Outlook, but isn't 

Do the spammers do anything as simple as test their spam against spamassassin? Hope not.

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.

I've rearranged my work email again. I've gone for the following:

• Fetchmail to get email from pop accounts

• Exim still as MTA

• Courier IMAP

• Mozilla Thunderbird

This has some advantages over the previous setup:

• IMAP means my mail is stored on the linux box in simple Maildir format: each message is in a seperate file. No nasty proprietary databases to corrupt, I can use a nice fast search engine.

• I can change email clients very easily without having to migrate the email: Outlook, Outlook express and Thunderbird all work.

• It fits in with my plan to hyperlink project blog/wiki with email. I just knock up something to convert the email to html on the fly.

• I installed sqwebmail to give me remote access anywhere in the company (that side of the firewall). I don't think I can use that to serve up web pages to other people without opening up my email account. Sqwebmail works but it's not very pretty.

• Thunderbird has a built in spam filter so I don't need Spambayes. This is a nice simplification. Spambayes worked but it was very slow handling email with attachments.

I've set up a horribly complex email system:

• fetchmail polls four pop email accounts and forwards them all to a single account under exim.

• qpopper provides pop access to the mail account

• SpamBayes pop3 proxy provides spam checking

• IncrediMail accesses the single pop account

• IncrediMail messages rule split the messages into various folders and also filters out the spam based on spambayes markup.

Seems like a lot of complexity, even more considering the URL redirection going on to give the email nice names. I could have exim pass the mail through Spambayes but the pop3 proxy includes a nice web-based review, training and configuration server.

I use IncrediMail because I get a stupid kick out of having little animated men in my email. It's also a nice robust email client. I used to use mozilla email it had trouble cancelling hourglasses which annoyed me. I was talking to someone recently who says ThunderBird is still doing that.

I find the Spambayes technology interesting. I'd like to run it on RSS feeds and the like to sort wheat from chaff.