09.18.07
How I Spent My Weekend
Yeah … things are definitely looking up.
07.01.07
A Tip for iPhone IMAP Users
I’ve wanted a phone with decent IMAP support for years, and the iPhone has really good IMAP support. The IMAP protocol, for those unfamiliar with it, is an email protocol that stores messages on the server (as well as, in most cases, caching it locally for offline access). This way, you can access your mail from any computer that has an IMAP-capable email client (including several webmail clients) and have all your archives, sent items, and even unfinished drafts available to you. Furthermore, if your computer crashes, your mail is still on the server, and is accessible from any other computer.
When I first set it up on my iPhone, however, it only showed my Inbox, and not any of the folders into which I file messages for later reference. That’s because Dreamhost, my email provider, uses Courier-IMAP to handle IMAP connections. If you’re experiencing the same problem, here’s how to fix it:
- Make sure your email account is set up and able to send and receive email. Also, be sure that you’re actually using an IMAP account, not a POP account. If you’re not sure, chances are you’re using POP, which means none of the following applies to you.
- From the Home screen, click Settings, then Mail.
- Select the account you want to configure.
- Scroll to the bottom of the account settings screen and click Advanced.
- At the bottom of the advanced settings screen there’s an option for “IMAP Path Prefix.” What you need to put there depends on your email provider’s settings, but the default for Courier-IMAP is INBOX. Check with your provider if that doesn’t work.
- Back up at the top of the advanced settings screen, there’s a section for “Mailbox Behaviors.” There, you can choose the server folders to use for drafts, sent items, and deleted messages. When you click on those options, the next screen should have settings for “On My iPhone” and “On the Server” — if there are no folders listed on the server, your IMAP Path Prefix isn’t set correctly.
And you’re done. Now all your email is automatically stored on the server, and you’ll have the same archives available whether you access it from home, on your iPhone, or through a webmail interface.
Some iPhone Notes
A day later than promised, I’ll admit — but I have an excuse: I was busy playing with my iPhone. This isn’t a full review; there are plenty of those elsewhere. Also, I completely agree with everything John Gruber said in his iPhone First Impressions post, so I’ll try not to duplicate too many of his observations here.
- The process of purchasing and activating the iPhone went flawlessly for me. I bought mine at the AT&T store at Fair Oaks and Howe in Sacramento; got there a little before five and had my phone a little before seven. The toughest part of the activation process was getting my account number from Sprint so I could port my old number over to AT&T – Sprint’s web site kept timing out, so I ended up waiting on hold for fifteen minutes for a customer care representative. The activation process in iTunes was pretty straightforward and fast (perhaps in part because my credit had been pre-approved at the AT&T store); within minutes, my phone was active, and about twenty minutes after that, my number had been ported and I was receiving incoming calls on my old number.
- Everyone else has already said it, but I’ll add my voice to the throng: the display is gorgeous. Videos look great, and text is easy to read. It does get greasy with use, but it’s so bright (even on the default setting) that you won’t notice any smudges while you’re using it. It also comes with a nice cleaning cloth (of the same suedelike material as Radtech’s ScreenSavrs).
- The virtual keyboard is surprisingly usable. I’ll grant that I have thin fingers, but really, typing on this thing is a breeze. And Apple’s right: the key is to trust the iPhone. It does a fantastic job of detecting mistakes and offering suggestions. Just slow down a little when you get to names and acronyms and other uncommon words, and you’ll be fine. Also, skip the one-finger thing — two-thumb typing is the way to go.
- The camera is pretty decent — not great, but fine for quick snapshots. I posted my first few shots to Flickr; more will follow.
- I got a leather case with a belt clip (specifically, a DLO HipCase), but more for convenience than protection — as PC World has demonstrated, the iPhone is surprisingly resilient.
- I’m so glad I went for a server-based spam filter a few months back — a lot of people who’ve been relying on client-side spam protection have found the iPhone basically useless for email, since it does no filtering of its own. So here’s another plug for Spam-X.
- Email messages that are relatively large (like the New York Times headline updates I get every morning) are partially downloaded first; there’s a button at the bottom of the message asking if you want to download the rest. This may only occur when connected over the EDGE network, rather than WiFi; I haven’t fully tested it yet.
- In my neighborhood, at least, the EDGE network is decently fast — not blazingly so, but usable. I’ve downloaded email, browsed the web, and watched videos on YouTube without any trouble. Incidentally, YouTube appears to scale video quality to your connection speed, so it looks better over WiFi.
- The headphone mic works well, and allows you to use the iPhone’s other features while you talk on the phone — but note that you can’t access the internet over the EDGE network while using the phone. WiFi works fine, though.
- Many have mentioned that there’s no Flash or Java support in the iPhone version of Safari. True enough, but remember that Java is different from Javascript, which is supported, and works exactly as it does in Safari. Very few web pages use Java these days, but Javascript is everywhere.
I said before that this wasn’t intended to be a review, but if it were a review, it would be a positive one. I love my iPhone, and look forward to seeing what Apple does with the platform in the future.
Finally, fellow iPhone owners might be interested in a few online resources to help get the most out of it:
* There’s an iPhone wallpaper Flickr pool that includes, among other things, the clownfish seen in the MacWorld keynote last January. I dumped a few of my favorites into an “iPhone wallpaper” album in iPhoto, which I sync to the iPhone so I can change the background to suit my mood. Currently I’m using this one.
* The iPhone Application List is coming along nicely. The most useful apps so far are the ones that repackage existing web-based apps for the iPhone’s display, like Google Reader and iPhlickr.
* iLounge has long been the best source of news and reviews about iPods and iPod accessories, and they’ve been covering the iPhone well, too. Macworld’s iPhone Central is doing a pretty good job, too.
04.24.07
Me When I’m Old
Via the Face Transformer, this is apparently what I’ll look like in a couple decades or so:
Speaking of aging, I think I’m going to need glasses soon. I was talking to a friend about this on Sunday, and the very next day I got a letter in the mail saying I have an appointment with an ophthalmologist later this month. This was interesting news, because I made no such appointment, the phone number they have on file for me hasn’t been mine for two and a half years, and the appointment is at UCD Med Center — which I’ve never even visited before — with a doctor I’ve never heard of. Nice of someone to think of me, though.
04.17.07
Stuff I Saw Today
- The Shins performing on the streets of Paris, courtesy of Blogotheque. That led me to a lot of great videos in the Take Away Shows series, but the Shins entry is still my favorite of the ones I’ve viewed so far.
- A blind man on roller blades. He had a sighted person with him, and he was holding a cane and wearing an orange vest that said “BLIND” on it. I would have gone with a dog instead of a cane, wouldn’t you?
04.16.07
Endings and Beginnings
Today was my first day as an employee of the County of Sacramento — and also the midpoint of a nine-day work week for me. I worked Thursday through Sunday at Apple, and now I’m working a regular week at DHA. Actually, I’m glad I did it this way, because I was kind of sad to leave Apple, so it was good to plunge into my new job right away.
I think I’ll enjoy my new job, too. The first half of the day today was spent in New Employee Orientation, so I only had about three hours at my new job, but they issued me the tools of the trade — one of these and one of these — and showed me around the office and to a couple of remote sites. I think I’ll fit in pretty well.
04.01.07
Helmets
That’s it — I need to get a motorcycle just so I can wear one of this guy’s helmets. Some favorites: Boba Fett, a knight’s helm, the doctor, and of course Spidey.
03.29.07
Start Date
Finally got a start date for the County job: April 16. I actually wasn’t sure for a little while there — not because of the background check, but because of the physical. As many of you may remember, my heart rate kept me out of the Army about ten years ago. Granted, it’s not something I’m too broken up about these days, but at the time it was disappointing, because I was really excited about going to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. I still think I could have handled boot camp, given the chance.
Bet they’d take me if I enlisted now, though — but they missed their chance.
Anyway, the County required a pre-employment physical, and sitting in the doctor’s office, memories of the Army physical came back. The doctor took my pulse twice, and both times it was well over a hundred beats per minute. But she told me not to worry about it, and, true to her word, she did give me a positive recommendation for the job. I still have to do one more TB test tomorrow, and then have that read on Monday, but this is the second stage of that test, and I’m not worried about it.
Now I can go back to having coffee in the morning — I was holding off until all this medical stuff was over with, even though, judging by my own measurements, it makes very little difference in my pulse. More importantly, I have a permanent job, with benefits and a retirement plan and a bit more money than I’ve been making. Less to worry about, in other words, which should help with that heart rate. Now, if I can just pass these exams next month…
03.28.07
Review: Postini Managed Spam Filtering
I’ve posted before about my ongoing battle with spam, and some of the weapons I’ve found useful. There was a time when I administered my own email server, with carefully chosen realtime blacklists and a regularly updated set of SpamAssassin rulesets. That was pretty effective, but far too time-consuming — not to mention the expense of having a dedicated server.
Eventually I moved to a shared hosting plan with DreamHost, and tried their built-in spam protection for a while (which also uses SpamAssassin). It was OK, but a bit too conservative — far too much spam was getting through, even when I customized the level at which a message was considered spam. I eventually decided to combine DreamHost’s filters with Gmail, and wrote a blog post and a wiki article about my technique. For a while, that worked beautifully, but something must have changed in Gmail’s filtering setup, because soon I was getting a lot of false positives. One especially annoying category was Amazon Marketplace purchase confirmation emails: without fail, Gmail marked every single one as spam, and since each one came from a different seller’s email address, there was no good way to prevent this from happening.
Next I tried CRM-114, which rarely gave false positives (except from one particular sender whom I had to whitelist), but also never really achieved an acceptable level of confidence. Every day it appropriately marked most of my spam (which I forwarded via procmail to another account) and let the majority of my legitimate email through, but also marked around 5-10 messages a day “unsure.” I then had to train it by forwarding those messages to myself, along with a special command to tell CRM-114 how it should have categorized them. I kept expecting it to get more accurate than that, but after several months I gave up.
And that leads me to the present day. For the past week, I’ve been using a hosted spam filter managed by Postini. Since Postini is designed for large companies, I’m actually going through a reseller called Spam-X, which allows me to filter just one address, as long as I pay for a year in advance. One address comes to $27/year, which is more than worth it for the time it saves me.
In the first week, with just the default settings and a basic whitelist, Postini has caught 419 spam messages, with 4 missed and 2 false positives. Those false positives were both sort of special cases: one was a message telling me I hadn’t won free tickets to a movie, followed by an advertisement; the other was from my bank, telling me there had been some suspicious activity on my account. Both addresses are now whitelisted. I’m still getting the occasional message that hasn’t passed through Postini’s filters at all; apparently some spammers don’t maintain their DNS servers very well. If it continues, I may write a quick procmail filter to reject mail that doesn’t have Postini’s headers.
There are a few features I’d like to see added, like keyword whitelisting, but overall I’m impressed by the feature set. The filters can be tuned to five levels of aggression, and in addition to the general filter you can customize filters for sexually explicit content, racially insensitive content, get-rich-quick schemes, and “too good to be true” special offers. If a legitimate message is mistakenly marked as spam, you can have it delivered to your mailbox as though it had never been blocked — and when you do, Postini asks if you’d like to add the sender’s address to your whitelist. For email discussion groups, you can whitelist “To:” addresses as well as “From:” addresses. I also like that Postini blocks mail before it even gets to my web host’s servers, let alone my local system. I had to change my DNS MX records, but once that was done, I could almost forget about spam altogether.
Verdict: highly recommended. I’m emailing like it’s 1999.
