The Citizens Bank Web site recently added a new feature: bill payees can be put into groups. When you first visit the “Add/Manage Groups” page, it looks like this: The first stupid UI decision should be obvious after a moment’s thought. Once you’ve set up your groups, you will rarely if ever create new ones,… Read More: Terrible UI Design of the Day »
Yesterday, my wife forwarded to me an email message she had received from our children’s school to ask me a question about it. I should have received the same message, but I hadn’t. A little research in the mail server logs revealed that she has received seven messages from the school in the past three… Read More: When “Constant Contact” Isn’t »
Mail clients nowadays offer you the option of saving a copy of outgoing messages in a Sent folder, and in fact most modern mail clients do this by default (that sure wasn’t the case when I first started using email, 23 years ago!). Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work so well. Here’s another option to for… Read More: Copying “Sent Items” on the mail server »
You would think that when your email client saves a copy of an outgoing message in your “Sent Items” folder, that message would be an accurate copy of the message that was sent, right? Well, in the case of Microsoft Outlook and IMAP, you’d be wrong. For some entirely inexplicable reason, Outlook assigns one message… Read More: Microsoft Outlook and IMAP: When a Message ID isn’t a… »
I use Vonage telephone service and Fedora Linux. My Fedora box is the router for my network. Vonage recommends letting its box sit between the Internet and my computer, so that its traffic always gets priority. However, there’s no way I’m going to give Vonage control of Internet connection, so I have it plugged into… Read More: HOWTO: Prioritize Vonage (and other) traffic in Fedora (and other)… »
Zombie botnet connection attempts to my mail server have gone down by 51% in the past four and a half months. I’ve posted more about this on my spam page, but a picture is worth a thousand words: It looks like the good guys are successfully shutting down some big botnets!
I have to confess that at this point it seems like posting examples of Citizens Bank incompetency is sort of like beating a dead horse, but here’s one that might amuse a few people. (Stay tuned for a future post about the >$300 in fees that Citizens Bank stole from me, which I’m holding off… Read More: More Citizens Bank idiocy »
The parental controls built into the Mac OS X Mail client can be easily bypassed by anyone who knows the email address of the child and his/her parent. The Mail client can be fooled into adding any address to the child’s whitelist (i.e., the list of addresses with whom the child is allowed to correspond),… Read More: Mac OS X Mail parental controls vulnerability »
About a month ago, I dived into the world of Mozilla add-on development by adopting the abandoned Thunderbird “Send Later” add-on and porting it to Thunderbird 3.1. The learning curve was pretty steep, and it took a lot more work than I expected to stabilize the add-on, but I think it was worth it, considering… Read More: I guess I’m now a Mozilla core developer, too »
I periodically post about organizations which can’t handle one of these two simple requests: (1) don’t spam me; (2) don’t send me junk mail. If an organization is incapable of implementing effective policies and procedures to accommodate these two straightforward requests from donors, they are probably also incapable of implementing effective, efficient policies and procedures… Read More: Yad Sarah: Good work, bad fundraising »