A while ago I was looking for material for my 9 year old son's homework. I found some stuff on Wikipedia and the same stuff (identical) on other websites. Some of it looked like whole paragraphs copied from the official website of the organization described in the Wiki entry (the particular case I encountered was not in the English version).
How does the Wikipedia avoid plagiarism, or can it? Anyone can paste in anything, and many people don't even realize there's a problem: they just see that they can "contribute" by pasting in some more info they found somewhere that is missing from the Wikipedia.
This can of thing can be real damaging, since the Wikipedia project certainly cannot afford the legal fees if it would be sued for copyright infringement (at least it is not backed up by someone like IBM;) )
I use FastMail with both SpamGourmet and SneakEmail.
SneakEmail and SpamGourmet complement each other very well. Spamgourmet is suited for producing aliases for one-time use. slashdot26jul04.15.hadaso@spamgourmet.com would forward me 15 messages before expiring (the date in the alias is just my way of perventing accidental reuse of aliases). Sneakemail works differently, giving addresses that cannot be tied to the user (randomlookingstring@sneakemailDOTcom) and organizing them in a foldet tree, allowing the user to add notes and apply different filtering options to each, including forwarding to different email addresses. Sneakemail is very useful for signing up to services one means to stay with (such as slashdot). The data stored in its folder structure is easily exportale is several methods (text, csv, download or email) and the interface is very lean and fast. Sneakemail also tags all email that passes through it with several custom headers making the further filtering of received email very reliable. (I haven't done it, but if one uses script based filtering like FastMail.FM offers, one can write a program to convert sneakemail's data downloadable as csv into a filtering script automatically).
Both sneakemail and Spamgourmet have "reverse forwarding", meaning they repace the "From address" so that replies go back through the forwarding service that rolls back the header information so the sender receiving the reply doesn't see my "real" email address (though I forward spamgourmet and sneakemail traffic to subdoamin addresses of a disposable alias in FastMail - PARANOIA!!!)
FastMail.FM actually offers enough disposable address functionality that forwarding services are not actually needed: the forwarding services add conveinence: Spamgourmet allows the confidence that addresses will self-distruct and spam won't eat up FastMail bandwidth, and not necssiate manual filtering. Sneakemail allows the convenience of keeping record of all my signups that I want to remember and a reliable way to filter them by sneakemail labels in X-sneakemail headers. FastMail is giving the most customaizable email experience by providing an extremely customizable webmail interface with Things like Sieve filtering language for filtering email, access to spamassassin scores in the headers for using the Sieve script to completely control the spam filtering, and so much more (and IMAP access, of course, or POP access to all folders for those paying users who prefer POP)
Gmail is not "free": it's ad-based! Hotmail is not free. It's ad-based. Yahoo! is not free. It's ad-based. Etc.
FastMail.FM free email accounts are free at the present (no ads yet), and offer a lot more functionality to the technically inclined user, but storagewise it's much smaller right now (10MB used to be a lot, but now it's not a lot anymore...)
Governments don't need your permision to read your email. They just do! And they don't need Gmail for that! The NSA could probably sniff enough backbone to reconstruct most email from packets.
In the help section there are links to report problems. It used to work in the past. I doesn't seem to work at the moment. I sent them a suggestion once that they should have an email address for reporting bugs. Partly because sometimes one needs to forward sapmle email to explain a bug. They are an email service, so they should have email as at least one option to communicate with them...
If you use POP3 to empty your Gmail mailbox, then you don't have your email on the server to use indexed search to find things. Your email is just stuck on one of your PCs: the one you happened to use to download a particular message. So using POP3 is completely incompatible with Gmail's way of handling email.
IMAP4 is much less incompatible with Gmail. It leaves the mail on the server. However, IMAP mailboxes are quite universally implemented as "folders", and this is quite incompatible with Gmail organization of email: Gmail keeps email in a single mailbox, and associates labels with them. Using IMAP with Gmail would mean that you have one huge folder in your email client that you sync with your one huge mailbox on Google's servers. Then you'd need the same kind of indexed search capabilities on the client that you have on the Gmail web interface. And you will not have your Gmail labels. So for IMAP to be useful with Gmail, there would have to be an extension to communicate the label information to the client, and there would need to be clients written to take advantage of this, and they should also have strong search capabilities.
I think that Gmail in itself is not as important as its future influence on the email world, and I am not refering to the current superficial influence of getting the competition to raise storage quotas. Gmail didn't advertise their service as "store a lot". They actually said that the 1GB quota is based on the assumption that email usage does not change in volume in the future, and that the 1GB quota is needed to handle a "never manage" mailbox that stores everything ever getting in and uses Google search to locate things, rather than manual mangement of email by the user.
The more inmportant influence of Gmail would be the incorporation of better search capabilities to email servers (IMAP servers) and to email client software, and alternatives to the folder paradigm, such as the labeling system.
It means that actually RSS software fails to do its role, of collecting all updates from a source. Plain on mailing lists don't fail here where RSS miserably fails. If your old washing machine dies and cuts your electricity with it just when you go out for the weekend, then when you come back you have lost all the weekend changes in your RSS feeds, but your mailing lists updates safely wait for you on your mail server!
IMAP has real push technology. IMAP IDLE command lets the server notify the client about a new message in a mailbox. No need for periodic mail checking.
A major difference between a POP/IMAP server and a web-server is that an email server has to sdeal only with a limited number of users that have mailboxes on that have their mailboxes on that server. A webserver might have to serve many millions of users.
I never used RSS, and it seems like a wrong model: instead of information really being pushed like in sending it by email, everyone is checking every website every hour for updates. I understand that people are afraid of getting spam if they subscribe to many services. But this problem is not really inherent to the use of email: it's just a problem of people not understanding how to use email. Every subscription should be made with a different email address, and filtering can prevent any info but the requested info to be received at a particular address. An application with user interface looking exactly the same as an RSS reader can handle these kind of things for the user, from whose point of view it would look exactly the same as RSS. But from the point of view of the information supplier it would be a totally different story: instead of having to deal with unexpected loads, the provider has total load control. Another advantage of email, from the user's point of view, is that information is updated not once every hour, but as soon as the information provider is ready to send it.
I think that the way this should really be handled is with email clients/servers transparently handling multiple email addresses and filtering for the email user. One would perhaps need a protocal for clients and servers to communicate relevant information about addresses and filters, and perhaps a protocol for communicating changes in subscriptions with information providers (so an email client can securely communicate an address change or perhaps more information when an address needs to change (say when a user clicks a "this is spam" button. The first spam message received would be enough to cancel the address. The user wouldn't even have to be aware of the address change. The spamers would have perhaps billions of unusable addresses and the trading of mailing lists would be impossible).
Slashdot Mirror
A while ago I was looking for material for my 9 year old son's homework. I found some stuff on Wikipedia and the same stuff (identical) on other websites. Some of it looked like whole paragraphs copied from the official website of the organization described in the Wiki entry (the particular case I encountered was not in the English version).
;) )
How does the Wikipedia avoid plagiarism, or can it? Anyone can paste in anything, and many people don't even realize there's a problem: they just see that they can "contribute" by pasting in some more info they found somewhere that is missing from the Wikipedia.
This can of thing can be real damaging, since the Wikipedia project certainly cannot afford the legal fees if it would be sued for copyright infringement (at least it is not backed up by someone like IBM
I use FastMail with both SpamGourmet and SneakEmail.
SneakEmail and SpamGourmet complement each other very well. Spamgourmet is suited for producing aliases for one-time use. slashdot26jul04.15.hadaso@spamgourmet.com would forward me 15 messages before expiring (the date in the alias is just my way of perventing accidental reuse of aliases). Sneakemail works differently, giving addresses that cannot be tied to the user (randomlookingstring@sneakemailDOTcom) and organizing them in a foldet tree, allowing the user to add notes and apply different filtering options to each, including forwarding to different email addresses. Sneakemail is very useful for signing up to services one means to stay with (such as slashdot). The data stored in its folder structure is easily exportale is several methods (text, csv, download or email) and the interface is very lean and fast. Sneakemail also tags all email that passes through it with several custom headers making the further filtering of received email very reliable. (I haven't done it, but if one uses script based filtering like FastMail.FM offers, one can write a program to convert sneakemail's data downloadable as csv into a filtering script automatically).
Both sneakemail and Spamgourmet have "reverse forwarding", meaning they repace the "From address" so that replies go back through the forwarding service that rolls back the header information so the sender receiving the reply doesn't see my "real" email address (though I forward spamgourmet and sneakemail traffic to subdoamin addresses of a disposable alias in FastMail - PARANOIA!!!)
FastMail.FM actually offers enough disposable address functionality that forwarding services are not actually needed: the forwarding services add conveinence:
Spamgourmet allows the confidence that addresses will self-distruct and spam won't eat up FastMail bandwidth, and not necssiate manual filtering.
Sneakemail allows the convenience of keeping record of all my signups that I want to remember and a reliable way to filter them by sneakemail labels in X-sneakemail headers.
FastMail is giving the most customaizable email experience by providing an extremely customizable webmail interface with Things like Sieve filtering language for filtering email, access to spamassassin scores in the headers for using the Sieve script to completely control the spam filtering, and so much more (and IMAP access, of course, or POP access to all folders for those paying users who prefer POP)
Gmail is not "free": it's ad-based!
Hotmail is not free. It's ad-based.
Yahoo! is not free. It's ad-based.
Etc.
FastMail.FM free email accounts are free at the present (no ads yet), and offer a lot more functionality to the technically inclined user, but storagewise it's much smaller right now (10MB used to be a lot, but now it's not a lot anymore...)
Governments don't need your permision to read your email. They just do! And they don't need Gmail for that! The NSA could probably sniff enough backbone to reconstruct most email from packets.
In the help section there are links to report problems. It used to work in the past. I doesn't seem to work at the moment. I sent them a suggestion once that they should have an email address for reporting bugs. Partly because sometimes one needs to forward sapmle email to explain a bug. They are an email service, so they should have email as at least one option to communicate with them...
If you use POP3 to empty your Gmail mailbox, then you don't have your email on the server to use indexed search to find things. Your email is just stuck on one of your PCs: the one you happened to use to download a particular message. So using POP3 is completely incompatible with Gmail's way of handling email.
IMAP4 is much less incompatible with Gmail. It leaves the mail on the server. However, IMAP mailboxes are quite universally implemented as "folders", and this is quite incompatible with Gmail organization of email: Gmail keeps email in a single mailbox, and associates labels with them. Using IMAP with Gmail would mean that you have one huge folder in your email client that you sync with your one huge mailbox on Google's servers. Then you'd need the same kind of indexed search capabilities on the client that you have on the Gmail web interface. And you will not have your Gmail labels. So for IMAP to be useful with Gmail, there would have to be an extension to communicate the label information to the client, and there would need to be clients written to take advantage of this, and they should also have strong search capabilities.
I think that Gmail in itself is not as important as its future influence on the email world, and I am not refering to the current superficial influence of getting the competition to raise storage quotas. Gmail didn't advertise their service as "store a lot". They actually said that the 1GB quota is based on the assumption that email usage does not change in volume in the future, and that the 1GB quota is needed to handle a "never manage" mailbox that stores everything ever getting in and uses Google search to locate things, rather than manual mangement of email by the user.
The more inmportant influence of Gmail would be the incorporation of better search capabilities to email servers (IMAP servers) and to email client software, and alternatives to the folder paradigm, such as the labeling system.
It means that actually RSS software fails to do its role, of collecting all updates from a source. Plain on mailing lists don't fail here where RSS miserably fails. If your old washing machine dies and cuts your electricity with it just when you go out for the weekend, then when you come back you have lost all the weekend changes in your RSS feeds, but your mailing lists updates safely wait for you on your mail server!
> What else goes through common Internet firewalls as cleanly as HTTP?
EMAIL does!
IMAP has real push technology. IMAP IDLE command lets the server notify the client about a new message in a mailbox. No need for periodic mail checking. A major difference between a POP/IMAP server and a web-server is that an email server has to sdeal only with a limited number of users that have mailboxes on that have their mailboxes on that server. A webserver might have to serve many millions of users. I never used RSS, and it seems like a wrong model: instead of information really being pushed like in sending it by email, everyone is checking every website every hour for updates. I understand that people are afraid of getting spam if they subscribe to many services. But this problem is not really inherent to the use of email: it's just a problem of people not understanding how to use email. Every subscription should be made with a different email address, and filtering can prevent any info but the requested info to be received at a particular address. An application with user interface looking exactly the same as an RSS reader can handle these kind of things for the user, from whose point of view it would look exactly the same as RSS. But from the point of view of the information supplier it would be a totally different story: instead of having to deal with unexpected loads, the provider has total load control. Another advantage of email, from the user's point of view, is that information is updated not once every hour, but as soon as the information provider is ready to send it. I think that the way this should really be handled is with email clients/servers transparently handling multiple email addresses and filtering for the email user. One would perhaps need a protocal for clients and servers to communicate relevant information about addresses and filters, and perhaps a protocol for communicating changes in subscriptions with information providers (so an email client can securely communicate an address change or perhaps more information when an address needs to change (say when a user clicks a "this is spam" button. The first spam message received would be enough to cancel the address. The user wouldn't even have to be aware of the address change. The spamers would have perhaps billions of unusable addresses and the trading of mailing lists would be impossible).