Ooooooooooh. Seems Age IT writer Charles Wright isn’t too keen on people disagreeing with him. In today’s Age he writes about Hotmail’s cancellation of free WebDav (Outlook/Outlook Express) access (bastards!) and mentions in passing that Fastmail.fm is great (so I’ve heard) and that it’s better than GMail, which has “no spam protection to speak of.”

Oh. Coulda fooled me. So I left a comment on his blog, mentioning that actually GMail does have spam protection. He replied reckoning yeah but it only catches about 30%. I replied saying it was catching most of mine. This apparently inspired a followup blog entry making note of overzealous Google-lovers writing to him if he criticises the company.

Well, what can I say. I’ve been using GMail for some months now, and feeding it mail addressed to one of my oldest and most spammed email addresses (dbowen at custard dot net dot au, circa 1997). GMail catches most of them. I just logged in after being away for three and a half hours (gasp!) and it’s caught 18 spams — no false positives, none slipped through into my Inbox. It’s not always this good, but I have no major complaints.

Maybe he looked at GMail early on, when the filters weren’t as good. Or maybe he attracts a higher class of spammer than me. Dunno. But it works for me.

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By the way, anybody want a GMail invitation? They keep giving me lots, and although I’ve tried giving some away via GMail swap sites, they keep on coming back. Leave a comment with your email address in the email field (it won’t display publicly, but I’ll see it).

I’ve been meaning to buy a couple of books from sitepoint for a while now. I’ve borrowed a copy of their HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, a fantastic guide to CSS and their Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL looks great so when they emailed me an offer of 20% off this book I thought why not.

That is until I saw the site. Ifyou spend over USD$70 (effectively two books) you get free postage anywhere in the world. Hmmm. Take the offer and save $7 off one book or reject the offer (which takes me below $70), pay full price and save $15?

Regardless, they’re great books.

A while back I was given the task of setting up encryption for sending files around. Ooh. Sounds tricky, I thought. I’ve seen PGP signatures on privacy freaks’ e-mail for years now, but it all seemed a bit like black magic. I had no idea how it worked.

I went looking, and it turns out it’s not really particularly difficult to figure out or get working. But I had to wade through a few hefty (in web terms) manuals to find all the info I needed. I never really found a web page which detailed the basics in an easy to digest format. This could be that page.

PGP and GPG

PGP is Pretty Good Privacy, invented by Phil Zimmerman and now run by the PGP Corporation. It’s the defacto standard for this kind of stuff. It’s fairly secure, and has the added benefit of compressing text quite well. PGP sell a number of solutions, but if you’re wondering about freebies, then…

GPG is Gnu Privacy Guard, which is the free implementation of (most of) PGP. It lives here: www.gnupg.org.

How to use it

Encryption of this type is all about keys. If you haven’t grasped the key concept before, here it is in brief: a recipient has a public and a private key. The public key is given to anybody. Senders encrypt stuff using the public key. Only the recipient has the private key, and uses this to decrypt stuff. Obviously if communication is two-way, you need multiple public and private keys. Okay? Easy.
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