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What's the problem? Only a moron would use idiotic social networking^H free hosting site like Facebook^H Tripod as a replacement for email^H web hosting. What the hell is wrong with today's young people anyway, that they're so happy to sign up to be serfs for corporate interests, and give up any privacy they ever had? Instant messaging, social networking sites^H ISPs and hosting sites are all corporate-controlled. Anything you do on there is subject to their rules, no matter how silly they may be. Anything you say can be seen by them. There is no expectation of privacy. If you want the freedom to say what you want, you have to use email. Except that today's stupid young people think that email^H self-hosting is "old fashioned" and only for talking to "old" (over 30) people.

I also think it's deliciously ironic that you use Mailbank/netidentity to host your personal email. Netidentity is also a company, no?

I don't get why the hell people get so worked up about people using facebook more and more. There's tons of reasons to use it. If you don't want to, that's fine, but the ridiculous vitriol by some people just confounds me.

also:

Except that today's stupid young people think that email is "old fashioned" and only for talking to "old" (over 30) people.

"Young" people don't give a fuck one way or another. Maybe you can't see the utility of facebook/other social networking sites, but there _is_ a lot of it. I can give a prime example.

I studied abroad in brazil. I'm an american, and I met a really nice girl from paris. We hit it off and were friends, and when we parted ways, she told me that her email was firstname.lastname@some.domain. Problem is, I could never get her email address right (I knew her name by sound, but couldn't figure out how to spell it). Later, I got her name from another friend, but her address was linked to her University and she had graduated since then, so it was a dead end.

A year and a half later, facebook opened up to france, and she joined the site. She looks at the group for the international students in brazil, found me, got my email and called me that day.

We've met up in paris twice since then and it was awesome. Can you see the usefullness I got out of it then?

My father had BellSouth DSL, and they've started blocking Port 25 for outgoing mail. This means that he couldn't send mail through the third-party mail server that he's been using for years. I don't want to have to change his settings (and he doesn't want to give people a new address) every time he has to change ISPs, so he pays a bit of money to use NetIdentity.com for his mail.

5 seconds of googling turns up an alternate netidentity port.

Here is the solution.

I'm of the opinion that anyone offering 3rd party mail service should use TLS/SMTPS (port 465) anyway.

I missed posting on version one of this story (doing work... frustrating how that gets in the way) so I'm posting my prior art example here.

My personal email address for a long time has been with MailBank.com (now called NetIdentity.com). This is how their ENTIRE BUSINESS has been working since 1996: you pay them (yearly) to get email/web addresses using your last name; they own domains like smith.net, and they give you (supposing your name is bubba):
bubba@smith.net
http://bubba.smith.net

Again, the operative year is 1996 (I got my email from them in 97 or 98).

Easy prior art: NetIdentity has been making their collective living with this very technique since 1996 ...

Too bad their prices have increased about tenfold in that time. It's not as cool now that you can get an entire full-service hosted domain for a bit more than their e-mail plus 5mb web site.

Easy prior art: NetIdentity has been making their collective living with this very technique since 1996 ...

Too bad their prices have increased about tenfold in that time. It's not as cool now that you can get an entire full-service hosted domain for a bit more than their e-mail plus 5mb web site.

I'm surprised they don't go after NetIdentity as well. They have thousands of domains that they sell third-level domains for (like john.doe.com or jane.smith.net). I've come across some of their domains just typing in random last names like smith.net, jacobs.net, fiala.com, hendricks.net, etc.

MailBank (Now NetIdentity) has been doing exactly this since 1996. I don't see these cretins getting very far.

Yeah, NetIdentity does this too. I tried to register my name, but they'd sucked it up along with a few thousand other names first. One could argue that it's legitimate business, and that they provide a service to people not knowing how to do this for themselves, but I think it's crap, and they have no right to register someone's name without having a claim to that name.