email identity crisis

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 04:21:01PM -0500, Peter R. Wood - Lists wrote:
> I was really curious to know, though, what other people did with their
> email... what do you do with yours?

Two things.

First, as you do, keep personal and work separate.  The day I lose or
quit my job is a bad time to also lose contact.  I even have a
co-worker who sends out regular FYA pieces, but always to my personal
address so other recipients don't pickup my work address de jour.

Second, I keep my personal accounts as few as possible.  I use one in
my own domain.  I can take it with me.  I used to have tIAC host it,
then I moved it to my own box in the basement.

I have an account on The World that only costs me if I use time.  I
used to have it forward to my main account, but that finally turned
into all spam, so I set up a responder that directs any real people to
a spelled-out version of my real address.

Hosting my own mail also brings flexibility.  I have a Palm VII that
comes with an e-mail address--but I don't let anyone have it.  Rather,
I selectively forward from my main account (and page my numeric pager
to let me know).  And for sending e-mail from my Palm, I send
everything through a special address in my basement that resends from
me, laundering all mentions of the Palm VII from the message or
headers.  Only my wife gets raw Palm mail from me, but she knows that
I will get any replies far faster if they go to my main account (and
can page me with her special code).  The Palm has a reply-to feature
that makes this easier for her.

I also used to have a dejanews account that I used for a few Usenet
postings.  I think Google has switched it over to some new address.  I
haven't checked it in a while.

I am tempted to someday put a spam filter on my machine that has a
"whitelist" and requires some extra interaction for new folks to send
me mail, but as most of my spam is bad bounces to bogus borg.org
address that I get as postmaster, I haven't done it yet--I figure I
have to man the postmaster account to be responsible.  In the mean
time I am putting spammers in the no_access list of the qmail xinetd
config file.  I don't yet know how well that works.

I am not currently auto filtering mailing lists to different
boxes--but mutt's willingness to delete whole threads with a single ^U
helps a lot.  I used to filter into Eudora folders, but that just
meant I far over subscribed and didn't read it all.


-kb