Gadgetopia

End of the road for SMTP?: I'm hearing this call more and more frequently: SMTP needs to be completely replaced. "The protocol that has defined e-mail for more than two decades may have a fatal flaw: It trusts you. Developed when the Internet was used almost exclusively by academics, the ...

An order from BarnesAndNoble.com wasn't delivered after 10 days, so yesterday I went to their site to find out why. I found a customer service form, and submitted it with my name, email, order number, etc. I got a confirmation page saying that the issue had been logged. Then, today, ...

I was doing a little development tonight, and I needed to check from email integration. I downloaded and installed a freeware SMTP server, and this is the icon that greeted me on my desktop: Yes, that's a hand grenade behind an envelope, perhaps the least confidence-inspiring icon choice ever. Who ...

I was traveling last week, and I couldn't get my outbound SMTP to work from anywhere for some reason -- from the airport, the hotel, the remote office...nowhere. Frustrating. So I started using GMail last week, with the intention of using it just until I could get back to home ...

A Mac In An Enterprise: This is a good article detailing the travails of one guy trying to use a Mac in a PC-based IT shop. He manages to do okay in the end. "For the last two years, I have had to use a Dell laptop at work running ...

In my eight years on the Internet, I've subscribed to hundreds of services and created at least that many user accounts across the Web. In the last few years, I've gotten better at recording the user names and passwords when I do this, but there are still many, many dozen ...

Last week, I posted about installing SpamAssassin for Exchange. It was a simple install, and it worked pretty well. I was getting a 50% filter rate right out of the box, and I was confident I could get it up to 70% or so by cranking down the threshold. In ...

Another Whack at Spam: Tim Bray lays out an interesting and viable solution for dealing with spam. This (imaginary) company has a simple business model. It operates a really big password-protected SMTP relay. It sends email from anybody to anybody for 1 cent ($0.01) each. You open an account with ...

I was looking for a spam filter for my Exchange server. I had great luck with SpamAssassin on another box (just regular SMTP), and luckily I found two great resources today: How To Use SpamAssassin on Win32: This is a fantastic example of someone documenting something they know how to ...

When it comes to AMP (Apache; MySQL; Perl, Python, or PHP) installers, we at Gadgetopia started with FoxServ. That project kind of died, so a few weeks ago, we touted the benefits of Sokkit. That product, while very good, wasn't free, which was a drag (though, at $24.95, it's still ...

Given that Microsoft products appear to be full of security holes, more and more thought is being given to migrating to other platforms. However, this has problems of its own. Macs are expensive, and Linux isn't quite ready as a desktop platform. This leaves a lot of people in limbo ...

My office is considering buying a new copier/printer. Have you looked at these things lately? I've been through a half-dozen vendor presentations in the last few days (they talk a long time when the price tag approaches $20K), and I can't believe the functionality available. One vendor dropped off a ...