New email address

[dougo]

I guess I should make it official: I have switched my primary email address from dougo@place.org to dougorleans@gmail.com. You're welcome to keep using the old one, since it's easier to type, but I expect Gmail to be more reliable (i.e. it shouldn't ever bounce). That's the main reason I switched, but I also decided it would be better to let Gmail filter spam at their end rather than me having to download it via POP and then filter it locally (with bogofilter, which just wasn't doing a good enough job). There are still a lot of downsides to using Gmail. I didn't get in early enough to get "dougo" (it took me a long time to realize that Google doing mail was not in fact an April Fool's joke, and even then it seemed pointless so I ignored it for a while). The user interface is better than I was expecting, but I still prefer VM in XEmacs, so I still use POP to read it all locally. Which makes it kind of a pain to report the spam that does manage to slip through (still about 3-5 messages a day), which can't be done through POP. And I vastly prefer composing mail in XEmacs to using a browser textarea, but fortunately it seems to work to just add a "From: dougorleans@gmail.com" field to the message to pretend that it's coming from Gmail (so that I can post to only-members-can-post mailing lists) even though I'm using Comcast's SMTP server to send it. (This is basically what I was already doing to send mail as dougo@place.org, except at the Exim level, but I haven't yet figured out how to tell Exim that my Gmail username is not the same as my Linux username.)

Update: piawblog reminds me that Gmail has a 6-character username minimum length (for non-employees). So dougo isn't taken, it's just not allowed. I think I was thinking of Sourceforge, where dougo is indeed already taken by someone else so my username is dougorleans.

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[dkuznick.livejournal.com]

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