This list of smarthosts for the major isps in the US should come in handy if your dsl ip address gets on a blacklist. Hopefully the isp’s are more concerned if their own smarthost gets on the blacklist. A quick change to exchange’s smtp server and a restart should get mail flowing (to roadrunner for example) again.

My hotmail account has now been upgraded to Live Mail. Considering my invite said it could be two weeks and it only took a couple of hours, I am impressed with the signup speed.
I’m not sure what I think of it so far but it doesn’t leap out to me as a “woohoooo!”. It does have a fairly decent looking calendar with the ability to share the calendar to my contacts, passport holders or anyone who knows the url (which is pretty easy to figure out). The publication of the calendar is in realtime, with an error message returned if the publication is revoked so no loss of privacy there.
There is quite a bit of functionality missing that can be seen at the Beta feedback page but you get a LOT of functionality missing if you use firefox – the calendar and the contacts tab is missing.

In my second email post for today – it looks like you can sign up for the Windows live mail beta – they say you have to wait a couple of weeks to get the invite. Neil had posted a way to get this earlier by hacking some urls in hotmail but that never worked for me so this is probably the next best thing. It will be interesting to see how it compares to gmail which is getting to be my mail client of choice now. It is certainly a lot better than Lotus Notes 6.5 which we have to use for work – that is the worst mail client ever – so many features just don’t work right (sorry Notes readers but it’s true!)

I upgraded thunderbird to rc2 last night – It wiped out the couple of extensions that I had installed. One (and the one I use most) was virtual identity that allows me to hack the from address in the email easily. Useful when you reply to emails sent to the catchall address and Mailing list Headers which gives better links for handling the header information. Both the above links allow you to download newer versions which don’t get picked up by the “automatic update”

I was at the bank filling out the mortgage application the other day (as you do) when I realised I had left some important documents on my usb key back at the office, but I had also emailed them to my gmail account. Using the banks pc I tried to go to http://gmail.com and was surprised to see that it was blocked by their content filtering – I guess that they try to restrict web based email so they can control the flow of email into and out of the organisation. However, www.google.com/gmail was not blocked and I was able to access the email that I needed. I also needed to get some dates from the past for the application so thought I would look it up on my blog – except that absoblogginlutely.net was also blocked….so back to google, a search for the terms that I needed restricted to site:absoblogginlutely.net, a click on the cached link and I had all the information that I needed. Just shows how useless corporate filtering is.

If you used to be on our wabsnwos email list about what Kristen and I are up to and didn’t receive an email this week then let me know so I can ensure you are still on the list.

After my previous post on an alternative mail client, most people recommended thunderbird (as I expected). However the suggestions of creating identities didn’t really help the situation as I need lots of identities. However this morning I had plenty of time (it is 5am at the moment) to browse the list of available extensions and there is one to create virtual identities on the fly, which easily enables me to edit the from field.Virtual Identity is the perfect extension for what I need….Now to import the Bat settings……….

Arrggggghhhh – I’ve had it with theBat! being so unstable on this new pc. Keeps freezing at very strange times and I can’t risk getting my mail store corrupt on the machine. The strange thing is that it was nice and stable on the old machine – both running xpsp2 and this one is a clean install so should be even less chance of crashing.
So, I’m in the need for a new (free) email client. I do like thunderbird but the lack of being able to type any old email address into the from field is the thing that stops me using it. I must have the ability to type in sales@ or fred@ or dontbotherspammingthisaddress@ in the from field so I can track down where I am getting spam and filter on it. From what I could tell with Thunderbird this is not possible. The feature of being able to run “macros/programs” on certain events is not critical now either as Geocaching Swiss Army Knife now does the email checking within the application.
Any suggestions? (oh – and the ability to import theBat! files would be fantastic)