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Michael Boyle's weblog

Little help!

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Little help!

I have an email problem that I can’t seem to solve. I use a couple of different email clients on a couple of different machines to check my POP email. I also get a lot of spam. My main machine, at home, runs Apple’s Mail.app and does a pretty good job at filtering it out. The problem is that when Mail identifies and removes a spam email from my Inbox, I would like it to delete the email from the server immediately, or at least on the following connection to the server. If it did so, then when I checked email remotely using my phone, only good emails would be left, saving hassle and bandwidth (my Treo bandwidth usage is metered).

I have asked about this in Apple’s Discussion Forums and at Ask MetaFilter, but no joy yet. Is there anyone who reads here who might be able to help?

I picked up my copy

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I picked up my copy

of Tiger on Saturday and, after doing a full bootable backup I installed it as an upgrade on my main drive. Unlike others, I have always had a very good experience with upgrade installs, and this time was no exception. Everything works flawlessly.

My main question now has to do with Mail. There are two new, and deeply related, features in Mail – the integration of Spotlight, Apple’s new search technology, and the Smart Mailbox functionality integrated directly in Mail. So, the question is this: is it time to ditch all my Mail folders and keep everything in one mailbox (per account) and just use Smart Mailboxes to sort everything out on an as-needs basis? It seems silly to keep things artificially segregated when I don’t have to do so. At the same time, I have tens of thousands of emails going back to 1994 or so in my system and I wouldn’t want to have performance issues with keeping so many emails in a single master list. Any advice?

Re-imagining email:

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Re-imagining email:

Boris makes some suggestions. I totally agree that the problem is a big one, and although there is some activity in the area (Boris points to some of this), it doesn’t seem like that much of what is being done is very innovative. Hopefully Tiger will address some of this stuff, with its reinvigorated search and updated Apple Mail. In theory it should be possible to implement a tagging system in Tiger that will leverage both Mail and the new search services.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly

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Last week, Tim O’Reilly

posted a piece about GMail that I overlooked, though many blogs I read referred to it. But it’s just the title that’s misleading – the piece itself is excellent. O’Reilly’s The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It’s Bogus is about MUCH more than the privacy concerns, it’s about the whole thing that GMail represents. “Pioneers like Google are remaking the computing industry before our eyes. Google of course isn’t one computer — it’s a hundred thousand computers, by report — but to the user, it appears as one. Our personal computers, our phones, and even our cars, increasingly need to be thought of as access and local storage devices. The services that matter are all going to run on the global virtual computer that the internet is becoming.”

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