antipaucity

Spurred by a recent question from an acquaintance in town, I asked on Google+ whether or not you can enable emailed notifications for a Community. This led to the elaborate Settings page for G+.

It turns out that if you combine enabling a Community’s “Community notifications” (under the specific Community’s settings (which you find by clicking the vertical ellipsis button on the Community page) with the following tree in your general Google+ settings, Notifications -> Email -> Communities -> Shares something with a community you get notifications from, you get a “mailing list” of sorts from your Community, which, niftily enough, also allows you to comment on the post via email (at least on the first notification of said post)!

There is a constant war over top-repliers, bottom-repliers, and inline-repliers.

If you’re replying to an email, reply at the top. Unless there is some overarching need to reply inline (hint – it is very very rare).

Bottom-replying makes me have to reread all the crap that has been left from previous messages before I get to what you wrote – what a phenomenal waste of time^*!

Just reply at the top. Like every sane person does.

Please.

^{*_{Yes, you should also trim whatever you don’t need when you reply – but that’s another story.}}

There needs to be a better way of handling group conversations. IRC uses the constant scroll mentality. Email has reply-at-top, reply-at-bottom, and reply-inline.

Forums, reddit, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and the like have a scroll-like view – every new post is merely sequentially listed after the last.

This can all lead to highly confusing digital conversations.

Somebody should make a parallel (maybe columnar) discussion/chat/email system where every participant can get their own space to reply, they can reply to specific things from different people, and everything can be viewed in an identified manner. Similar to how Track Changes works in Microsoft Word.

Surely it should be That Difficult™ to do this, should it?

I had need to automatically process emails to a specific address to pull attachments out, and this is how I did it:

$ yum install mpack

$ cat extract-attach.sh 
#!/bin/bash
rm -rf ~/attachtmp
mkdir ~/attachtmp
mv ~/Maildir/new/* ~/attachtmp
cd ~
munpack ~/attachtmp/*
rm -rf ~/attachtmp

$ crontab -l
*/5 * * * *	~/extract-attach.sh

Why, you may ask? Because I get a report a few times per day to the email address in question.

Note – this runs in my crontab every 5 minutes on a CentOS 6 x64 server; I’m sure the process is similar/identical on other distros, but I haven’t personally tried.

After several years of pushing all of my personal email into Gmail, I’ve decided that relying [almost] exclusively on one provider is just not the best idea ever.

Google is great. But, as with any cloud service, exclusively relying on just one provider is not the best.

Going forward, I am going to be relying on my own server (which I have been indirectly for several years), as well as Yahoo. And Microsoft Live for Domains (which is freely available the way Google Apps used to be).

I love cloud computing – right now, it’s a major component of my job function. But it’s not a panacea. Everything has its place, cloud computing included.

So, I am not saying “goodbye” to Google. I’m just saying “hello” to others 🙂

Why has no one come up with an email routing/sending system that can use multiple at (@) signs?

For example, why not have an author@antipaucity.com@apple.com?

The email could be routed to both auther@antipaucity, and @apple – and/or could force-route mail through the first mail system (presuming credentials were available).

Let the flames spark.