John Naughton quoted this on his blog, but it’s so good I had to repeat it here.
Two Donald Trump supporters die and go to heaven. God meets them at the Pearly Gates.
“Tell us,” they say, “what were the real results of the 2020 election, and who was behind the fraud?”
God answers: “My children, there was no fraud.”
After a few seconds of stunned silence, one turns to the other, whispering: “this goes higher up than we thought.”
The problem of large numbers of asylum seekers trying to cross the Channel in small boats is one, I confess, that I have avoided thinking about too much — and I therefore understand few of the subtleties involved.
So I was particularly taken by this BBC piece, which follows one 14-year-old boy, Obada, who died a couple of weeks ago on the Normandy coastline.
How did he get there? Why was he trying to get to the UK, rather than some other country?
The authors have done a lot of research to make it a personal story, rather than another abstract statistic.
Well worth a read.
All the world’s a garden centre
And all the men and women merely customers.
They have their checkouts and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His visits being seven ages.
First, the infant,
Yelling and crying in his all-terrain stroller.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his gameboy
And scowling morning face, bored by all he sees,
Until the animatronic reindeer arrive in mid-September.
And then the lover, sighing like a furnace,
With a woeful text to his girlfriend about
How his mother had to stop on the way.
Next, the influencer, seeking a sausage roll
And a power tool for his next ‘unboxing’.
Then the PR consultant, now behind the stroller,
Feigning an interest in his wife’s roses;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
To the retiree, whose rose garden is his pride and joy,
His wife mostly absent at the golf course. Last scene of all
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and such oblivion
That you take the bus to the garden centre to shop for clothes.
Do you use one of those ‘free’ email services, which make money by reading your emails so they can sell things to you, and sell you to others? Or do you get it from your ISP, which makes it hard for you to change supplier and possibly quite complicated when you move house? Or do you pay for a proper email account?
I’ve been doing the latter — using Fastmail for all my personal, family and business email — for a dozen years now, and have always been very happy with the service, accessing it through standard email programs on each of my various platforms. They’ve also always had a very nice webmail interface, but in general I prefer to use native apps rather than websites where I can.
This week, though, I’ve been experimenting with some features that turned out not to be quite so easy using my particular favourite apps, but were available through the site. One example is ‘Snooze’, which takes an item out of your inbox now but brings it back at a time you specify — this evening, for example, or next weekend. Things like this are nice to have, but there was another feature that was becoming a bit more essential to me.
I have a pretty large array of email addresses, which I use for various purposes. Some of them are just aliases on my main account, and some are separate email services provided by the university and other organisations. But I arrange that everything ends up at Fastmail, where it’s under my control and can be centrally searched, managed and archived. I either forward mail from each other remote service, or configure Fastmail to go and fetch it periodically.
Aside: I was bitten once in the past by having an email account at one of my previous companies, to which I still had access through being on the board for a while after I left, but when the company was closed down rather suddenly, the GSuite account was deleted almost instantaneously before I knew about it, and quite a bit of my email from that period simply vanished into the ether. I have the majority of my email stretching back as far as 1991, and I value that archive, so this was a bit of a blow. If you also value your data, make sure you look after it yourself!
Anyway, it’s becoming ever more important, in the battle against spam, that when you send mail, you send it using a server that is properly configured to be officially associated with the ‘From’ address you’re using. Some servers, especially GMail, are pretty fierce now about rejecting email purporting to come from, say, myuser@statusq.org but are actually sent using my account at the university. (There’s a range of technical standards such as SPF and DKIM which help a receiving email server assess the claimed provenance of an email message.)
And I often do need to send using different From addresses, so I normally have my email apps set up to talk to all of my email accounts (currently whittled down to just Fastmail, iCloud, Gmail and University, though I used to have rather more), and once all of these are set up on all of my many devices, in general they’re pretty good about sending the right message through the right service. But it’s a little untidy, and I end up with a lot of mail folders even if most of them are empty. And when I want to set up a new alias, I need to make sure it sends from the right place on every one of my devices…
This week, though, I hit one more issue.
There’s a service I’ve been using even longer than Fastmail, and that’s Pobox. This is one of those email-address-for-life services, and ‘quentin @ pobox.com’ has been the email address I’ve given out to people since roughly the turn of the millennium, ever since I realised how important it was to have an email address that would outlive any particular employer or ISP, but before it was easy to do so using your own domain (which is, of course, the best option now). There’s also a great deal to be said for having an address that is easy to dictate to people: they’re always grateful not to have to copy down something like my.long.surname4356@hotmail.co.uk, as I am whenever I have to type or write it down myself! (Even with my nice pobox address, I have keyboard shortcuts on all of my devices so that ‘qpo’ automatically expands to my email address. Highly recommended, if you don’t do something similar already.)
Anyway, Pobox now offers various services, but the basic one I’ve been using for 23 years simply forwards my mail to wherever I ask them, after having filtered out the most obvious spam. I don’t actually store any email there, and I don’t have an IMAP account with them.
And this is where I was starting to come unstuck, because I do now need to send email using their SMTP service, whenever I want it to appear to come from pobox.com, but my normal favourite Mac email app, for example, though amazingly powerful in other ways, only really understands the concept of email servers which have both incoming and outgoing services. Perhaps understandably, it, like many other apps, doesn’t cater for a complete email server that’s only used for sending, can’t receive, and for which any incoming emails appear in another account! Not yet, anyway!
All of which is a long explanation about why I’ve been using the Fastmail web interface again, because Fastmail does allow you to select a different SMTP/Outlook/Gmail/whatever server for sending depending on your outgoing From address. And it does allow you to retrieve email from multiple accounts without having to set them up on each of your devices. And it offers a range of features that should satisfy the requirements of most power users, all without having to sell your soul to, say, Google, or use nasty proprietary systems like Outlook/Exchange. Yet your email is still completely accessible using standards-compliant IMAP etc when you want it. And my Pobox emails do get sent using Pobox. And my university mails get sent using Exchange without me having to touch Exchange for anything else. Perfect.
But what about the fact that I prefer to use native apps instead of web sites for this kind of thing?
Well, there are official Fastmail apps for iOS and Android which work pretty well, and on the Mac I’ve been rather pleased to discover FMail2: a thin wrapper around the web interface but implemented as a local app, meaning it can be your default mail program, handle `mailto:` URLs, see an icon in the menu bar, etc.
All of which helps ensure that if I send you an email from my favourite email address, you’re less likely to have it filtered out as spam.
Lucky you.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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