Tag: email

Back to Gmail-USSR

(please, forgive my untalanted Beatles reference)

My email requirements have changed again. This time the changes are so significant that I am re-considering GMail. It looks promising.

Why so? Well, the nature of my email discussions has changed so that GMail threads conversations handle my load best of all. Also GMail is nicely integrated with Google Calendar, which I am using extensively lately. And another feature that I immediately grew into is multiple account management.

If you feel like dropping me a line, leonid.mamchenkov@gmail.com is my GMail address. Also, if you need any invites, let me know – because I have a few.

I can’t believe my Inbox

Every time the year is coming to an end, I feel this urge to clean things and to throw out tonnes of garbage. I don’t know why that happens. And I don’t know why I can’t resist this feeling.

With this year stepping into the month of December, I got the regular itch. With nothing much to throw out at my hands (most of the stuff is gone since last year), I decided to clean my Inbox (the email one).

I have created an Archive folder in my mailbox, in which I created further subfolders for every year that I had any correspondence for – 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, … I then moved all closed discussions to the folder of approrpiate year. I have deleted all test messages. I have thrown out all system notification messages (cron scheduler, log rotations, spam and virus reports, etc). I went throug the same process a couple of times, tagging more stuff to move every time.

I have finished the clean-up and now I can’t believe my eyes. My Inbox now has only 13 messages! 8 out of these are connected to a discussion that I hope will end before the end of the year. They’ll be moved to archives too. The rest of the messages are those that may result in further discussions or may not. So, I’ll have to keep them in for a while.

But 13 MESSAGES!!! My Inbox hasn’t been so small since the last millenium, when I just signed up for some free webmail account and received 12 spam messages within an hour. I’m really really impressed.

P.S.: I guess I can also use my primary email address from my mobile again, without seeing phone crashes and huge GPRS bills.

New color scheme for Vim

I’ve been using dante color scheme for Vim for as long as I can remember. It’s a nice one and suits me perfectly. Sometime though I feel that need for a change and than I have to go through a rather painful process of getting something new. This time I decided to change my Vim color scheme. This process is particularly painful because:

  • there are a lot of color schemes available for Vim
  • screenshots are rarely available
  • most color schemes are designed for graphical mode (gvim), while I use console only

Anyway, I went through a number of color schemes today and decided that I like Impact. Not only it is designed for console, but it also defaults for black background, which is exactly what I use.

I tried it with both Perl files and email messages and I am satisfied with my choice. Now for some useful stuff…

Update: I came across a great page that is generated by a perl script once in a while. The goal of the page is to provide an easy way of finding a colorscheme appropriate for your tastes without the hassle of installing numerour colorschemes on your computer.

SPAM isn’t all that bad

Where I look on the web, everyone is complaining about SPAM. “My Inbox is full of SPAM”, “I am lacking behind because of SPAM”, “My site was SPAMed” and stuff like that. I beileve that everything in the world has its good and bad sides. Such situation with SPAM when everyone is complaining about it is one-sided though. I believe there is some good to be found. Here is my small contribution.

Every time comments in my blog get SPAMed I feel good. You might think that I am such a pathetic loser that SPAM comments are the only kind that I get, but that’s not true. I am soon to celebrate a 1000th comment (that’s a hint by the way). The reason for my joy is my choice of software. Since I migrated to WordPress SPAM stopped bothering me. At all. When yet another script comes in and leaves two or three dozen comments about “online casino” or “morgage bonus” all over my posts, all I have to do is click on “Awaiting moderation” link in the administration interface, scroll down to the “Mark all as SPAM” link, click it, and than click “Moderate comments” button to submit my moderation. That’s it. It probably takes me less time to discard all of these comments than it takes that script to generate and post them. Fantastic!

But my blog SPAM is not the only kind that provides me with good mood. Occasionally, a SPAM message would get through my anti-SPAM software that protects my mailbox. Since these are usually singular messages which are easy to identify and delete, I can afford some time to look inside. More often than not they are pretty funny. Consider this one from today.

From: info@mamchenkov.net
To: leonid@mamchenkov.net
Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2005 09:01:08 -0700
Subject: Your password has been successfully updated

[-- Attachment #1 --]
[-- Type: text/html, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 0.5K --]

   Dear user leonid,

   You have successfully updated the password of 
   your Mamchenkov account.

   If you did not authorize this change or if you 
   need assistance with your account, please 
   contact Mamchenkov customer service at:
   info@mamchenkov.net

   Thank you for using Mamchenkov!
   The Mamchenkov Support Team

   +++ Attachment: No Virus (Clean)
   +++ Mamchenkov Antivirus - www.mamchenkov.net

[-- Attachment #2: approved-password.zip --]

Isn’t it funny? First of all, I am the administrator of mamchenkov.net domain and all services related to it. So I know that this is crap even before I finish reading the Subject line. Oh, wait. I actually know that this is crap even before I finish reading the From email address, because, guess what, there is no such email as info@mamchenkov.net. And, of course, there is no such thing as “The Mamchenkov Support Team”. Or “Mamchenkov Antivirus”. That all is just pure fun! It’s like I would be trying to convince you that you are not you, but that I am you, although I am obviously not. :)

Now that I am thinking about it, I was wrong saying that the Web remembers only the bad stuff about SPAM. There was a lot of laughter on that Slashdot story about some African cosmonaut left on the orbit. And there was this poetry project that was using phrases from the SPAM messages composed into poems.

What’s your SPAM fun story?