Email Address Typos can Spell Trouble

A quick extract from yesterday's IT Blogwatch, in which The U.S. Air Force gets caught sending classified data in unencrypted email:

Sensitive information ... swamped Gary Sinnott's email inbox after he established www.mildenhall.com ... Emails intended for Air Force personnel at the Mildenhall Air Force base (who uses the domain mildenhall.af.mil) were being misdirected to the owner of the .com site ... hundreds of classified emails were sent from around the world ... detailing all kinds of secret military information ... I ask you, what sort of drooling idiots do the US Military employ? Do they breed them in special farms?

And so on, and so on...

Reminds me very much of when I helped migrate Ferris Research's email accounts from The Electric Mail Company to Google Apps. -- I set up a catch-all account to make sure we hadn't missed any weird aliases or mailing lists. You've almost always got to do this when migrating an email setup, because it's so easy to miss a useful address. You'd be surprised how many times you can ask the question "Is this alias still needed?", getting the answer "no", and find that in fact it is.

Anyway, I was amazed how much misdirected email we received -- much of it meant for ferris.edu (Ferris State University, Michigan), as well as obviously confidential attorney-client communication, love notes, and more. All of human life was here for a while.

I guess it only goes to prove -- if proof were needed -- that .com is the only game in town, when it comes to domain choice.

Gmail, How do I Love Thee? Let me Count the Ways...

Here's a quick Gmail goodness grab-bag top-10...

1. Spam filtering. It just works. I estimate it kills more than 99% of my spam, and the only occasional false positives I get are from Yahoo Groups (which is a spam cesspit anyway) and mailing lists that include spam samples (uhhh...)
   
   
2. IMAP access. Yay, we've been asking and asking and asking for it, but it finally arrived yesterday.
   
   
3. Local front-end servers. Recently, Google moved the POP/IMAP/SMTP servers I connect to. They're not now in the U.S., but much closer to me (in the UK?). Some sort of routing cleverness, I dare say. This means downloading a load of messages is now very, very fast.
   
   
4. Search and Filters. Fast, flexible, frequently-very-useful. Especially when combined with the saved search extension for Firefox (using Greasemonkey or the Better Gmail extension).
   
   
5. Labels. I know some people hate 'em, to which I say, "Just think of them as folders." But they're so much better than folders, mainly 'cos you can "file" a message in more than one of them.
   
   
6. Fetchmail. Integrated, as way of grabbing your email from other accounts, using POP. Saves auto-forwarding, which is increasingly broken.
   
   
7. AJAX. Not as ground-breaking as OWA, not as flashy as Oddpost/Yahoo/SWA, not as mashable as Zimbra, but fast and usable all the same.
   
   
8. Keyboard shortcuts. A big productivity saver. I hate to move my hands off the keyboard to find my mouse -- that's a key reason why I don't "do" Mac OS.
   
   
9. Google Apps. A white label version of Gmail is included in Google's hosted applications service.
   
   
10. Free. Yes, as a confirmed cheapskate, this is a good thing. Even Google Apps is free for up to 50 mailboxes. No more do vanity domain owners have to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous email forwarders.