I’ve recently been converted.

No, I’m not talking about religion here. (Who knows why I would ever want to blog about religion, anyway!) I’m actually talking about something much more relevant to most of us in this day and age: e-mail.

I’m sure that many and relate themselves to me when I talk about how, during the past school year, I really didn’t do much to keep my e-mail under control, and I found myself having an inbox full of stuff dating all the way back to last September. By the end of June, I had over 1500 messages in my inbox, and I didn’t even remember what most of it was.

Well, one of my goals this summer was to get my life better organized (both in the real world and the computer world), and e-mail was certainly a major target for getting my life back in order. And lo and behold, I found my inspiration in the July 2008 issue of Macworld, which featured a three-part article by Joe Kissell called Empty Your Inbox (part 1, part 2, part 3), which was heavily based on the Inbox Zero philosophy by Merlin Mann. I delved into the Macworld article, Merlin’s video presentation and Merlin’s own set of blog articles surrounding this novel idea of getting your inbox down to nothing.

And after reading and watching, surprising as though it may seem, I’ve successfully implemented Inbox Zero into my life this past month, and now could hardly imagine going back to letting my inbox fill up. (I’m still going through the last few transitional growing pains of adjusting to a new paradigm for my e-mail, but a lot of this stuff is finally starting to become instinctive.)

While you can go check out this info for yourself, here’s my summary of what Inbox Zero is all about, and how it works.
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Tags: data detectors, e-mail, inbox, Inbox Zero, Macworld, Mail, Merlin Mann, OmniFocus, organization

When Apple announced MobileMe back in June and announced that it would be replacing .Mac with a far superior service, I for one was excited. At last, .Mac/MobileMe was actually worth something. (I still think $99/year is a bit pricey, but I’m willing to live with that here.) In fact, if I wasn’t doing all of my stuff from one single computer, if I had one of Apple’s handheld devices, and if I actually had money to spend, I would have purchased MobileMe the very first day.

Boy, am I glad that I’m dirt poor right now.

As completely strange as it might seem, it appears that Apple has flubbed up MobileMe in every conceivable way these past few weeks. Take first the fact that it took about three times as long for the .Mac-to-MobileMe transition to take place (leaving many many .Mac users without any access to vital .Mac services that they needed for a few days), then throw in the whole ongoing fiasco with the so-called “1%” who lost use of their e-mail and actually lost a few days worth of their e-mail in the process. Many of these people weren’t even people who signed up for MobileMe, they signed up for .Mac, and were not expecting MobileMe to happen or for them to have to go through this. I mean, I can see something like this happening to a free service, but when Apple is getting $99/year from these people, that’s pretty ridiculous. Plus the fact that Apple was completely tight-lipped about this for nearly a week says some pretty bad things about how Apple handles its services and its customers.

Now, today, it turns up that Apple is limiting support to those people who were part of that 1%, and only people whom Apple thinks was on that 1%, according to TUAW. I mean, for the love of Pete, has Apple considered that other people may have other problems with MobileMe too? Just this morning, my friend Daniel Brusilovsky was trying to get support through one of those online live support things. After just saying “hi” to the support representative before even having a chance to type his question, the support guy said “Sorry, I can’t help you with this issue, I can only help with MobileMe Mail,” and closed the chat connection. What gives?

Apple, I know that you’re all big and successful now with all of the Macs, iPods, and (now) iPhones you’re selling, but it appears you’re starting to let that go to your head. If you want to be able to rebuild the already-ruined reputation that MobileMe has garnered, you’re going to have to do a lot more things correctly, and you’re going to have to start with the way you treat your paying customers. Otherwise, I’m not giving you a single blood-red penny.

Tags: Apple, e-mail, Mac, MobileMe, outage, reputation, ripoff, support

Hello to everyone out there in No Man’s Land. I’m in the middle of a brutal war, one that you may have engaged battles with in the past: the war on spam. But today, the enemy has pulled out a secret weapon that is completely decimating me, and could pose a very serious threat.

No, I’m not writing this way to be funny, I’m very serious about what’s going on. It has to do with one of the websites that I maintain, the one for the 17th District PTA. Because its webhost gave up the ghost about two months ago, I’m currently hosting it under the same hosting package as the one for Webmacster87.info, but today it’s apparently been scapegoated into a pretty difficult situation. Here’s a copy of the dispatch that I sent to my webhost just a few minutes ago:

To whom it may concern:

I’m writing concerning a rather serious issue which has come up today concerning one of my domain names. The main domain name for my site is webmacster87.info, however this one is concerning 17thdistrictpta.org which was added on.

Today I have been receiving an abnormally large amount of spam coming to my personal e-mail (webmacster87@gmail.com)–about 1800 in the last twelve hours alone, and still counting. However, all of these were actually “Delivery Status Notification (Failure)” messages that, when I examined them, showed that it appears that some spammer has been sending out spam e-mails with From e-mail addresses that have @17thdistrictpta.org suffixes. Because many of these spam e-mails were sent to invalid addresses, they bounced back, and since the fake From addresses (like “ahplatne_1979@17thdistrictpta.org” and other random things like that) don’t exist, all of those bounce-back things have been sent to my own personal e-mail, since it is the “catch-all” address.

I am concerned that some spammer or group of spammers somewhere is using our domain name fraudulently as a scapegoat from which to send out spam messages, and I am concerned that this could have grave ramifications for the name of the organization that it represents, such as it being blacklisted by e-mail services, or possibly being reported to you or someone else as though I was responsible for those spam messages. I’m also quite concerned about the impact that the amount of bounce-back messages is having on my bandwidth and your servers.

I don’t know if you have the ability to do anything about this issue, but since you are my web host and your servers are the ones being affected by the tremendous amount of bounced-back messages, you would be the best ones to report this issue to. I would appreciate any advice and assistance you could possibly offer on how to deal with this issue so that I am not affected by further ramifications (and can possibly stop the deluge of bounce-backs).

Thanks for any help you can offer.
–Douglas Bell
Webmaster, California 17th District PTA
http://www.17thdistrictpta.org

As you can see, this is very serious, and I’m very scared about what the possible blow-back from this could be, so I could REALLY use any help you could offer. Have you ever had an issue like this? Do you have any ideas of how I can stop this? Please sound off any advice you may have in the comments!!!

Update: Here’s an example of what I’m dealing with, as you can see in Gmail’s spam box, and an example bounced-back e-mail. But it’s not the fact that I’m getting these bounced-back e-mails that I’m worried about, I’m worried about blacklists and people seeing the domain name on these spam e-mails and thinking bad things…

Tags: 17th District PTA, Delivery Status Notification, e-mail, spam, urgent, web host

I’ve blogged about how Apple has really ramped it up against Microsoft Office with iWork ‘08. That is, they’ve ramped up against Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. But what about Outlook/Entourage? Well, Apple also has its return weapon for Entourage, which is the combination of Mail, Address Book, and iCal, and in Leopard, Apple has added even more to these three applications to increase the competition. But are these enhancements worth their weight in gold? Well, Address Book hasn’t seen any significant new features, so I’ll ignore it this go-around. iCal’s Feature Presentation will happen later this month, which means today’s focus is on Mail.
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Tags: Address Book, calendars, data detectors, e-mail, Entourage, features, HTML, iCal, iPhone, iPod touch, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, Mail, managers, newsfeeds, notes, Outlook, productivity, review, RSS, Safari, stationery, Stikkit, sync, templates, to-dos