MichaelPrewitt.com

I had been using JumpLine as my web-hosting company. It had been working well, but was somewhat expensive for the plan I had ($19.95/month). Plus it had limitations that kept me from growing my website. And it did not have a good web-based spam filter (at least not a free one), so I was downloading countless spam every month—an especially atrocious problem for an email device like the iPod Touch, which does not have any built-in spam filtering.

After some research, I decided to go with HostGator. The price is much cheaper (only $4.95/month), and at this point they provide everything I need. They use SpamAssassin as their spam filter, which seems pretty standard.

When it comes to server-side spam filtering, I prefer Abaca, which is what we use at 3ABN, but very few web hosting companies seem to offer it. SpamAssassin deletes a lot of junk without even delivering it, and marks other suspicious email as spam for easy sorting. This is OK. Abaca doesn’t deliver any suspicious spam, but holds it online, and it lets you sort the spam by the likelihood that it is spam, which is very, very convenient. With Abaca, at most I have to look at 5-10 messages, and I know everything after that is junk. With SpamAssassin, it is necessary to check each message in the spam folder, which thankfully isn’t that much after the obvious spam has been auto-deleted.

Email (IMAP)

Besides the spam filtering, I wanted to simplify my email system. I had multiple email addresses I wanted to consolidate. In short, I wanted to be able to manage all email through a shared account (IMAP), so that when I read or delete a message on one computer or on my iPod Touch, it is marked as read or deleted when I check my email on another computer; and when I send a message from one computer, the sent message can be accessed on the other computers. It was pretty easy to set up on HostGator, and it has made my email communication so much better, more fluid. It is also web-based, so that I can check it from a browser if necessary, from anywhere in the world.

Reinstalled XP Pro

I have Windows XP Professional on my Dell desktop computer, which I think had been installed 4-5 years ago. It had become very sluggish, so that even opening a web browser took a lot of time. I decided it was time to reinstall. It is working much better now (snappier, as the geeky types like to say). However, I am finding that Ubuntu meets most of my needs very well (too bad you can’t run Adobe software under it), so I’ve been spending more time with that lately, which is also installed on the same machine.

iPhone 3.0

I don’t have an iPhone, but iPhone 3.0 is the name of the software that runs on the iPod Touch. I just did the upgrade, and while I don’t yet notice any dramatic differences, it does have some very nice features (copy and paste, notably; and push notifications) that I look forward to using more.