What is it that sends OSX into a tailspin? And why is .Mac so rubbish? (updated)
Every so often I disconnect from the network at work - an Appleshare on Ethernet - without doing the rituals of bumping the volumes and making the right incantations as I do so. And sometimes the machine then wakes up fine, and sometimes it then goes into the tailspin of death, wherein apps won’t launch (they just bounce in the Dock, like some sort of accused on speed) and you have to force-quit things and they never quite come back. The only way back is the three-fingered force restart.
Why does it only do it some times and not others? It did it this evening, so I’ve lost a stack of things I’d wanted to post, pulled from the river of news like little minnows. Bum.
Meanwhile, why is it that .Mac has such terrible spam filtering? Gmail, by contrast, which you would think has a smaller user base (though maybe not… are there any numbers?) has excellent spam-chewing; I’ve only ever noticed one false positive. By contrast .Mac, which I don’t use a lot, seems to generate a constant stream of junk.
I think I’ll likely give it up soon. I don’t need the web pages, and the .Mac “your files on the web” thing has always been hopelessly slow (perhaps it’s faster in the US), and I don’t need iWeb - I’ve got a real one, thanks - or, um, is there anything much else that comes from .Mac?
Update: and even though .Mac has had a webmail interface overhaul (mm, stack those adjectives), it’s still not much cop, according to a review by the people at Tidbits:
Also missing from the toolbar is the Junk button, which in Mail can not only move a message to the Junk mailbox but also add a Junk flag and update Mail’s junk mail filter with information about that message. Unlike Mail, .Mac webmail does not have a learning spam filter. You can manually drag a spam message to the Junk folder, but doing so does not set its Junk flag (as that’s something Mail tracks locally, not a message attribute that’s changed on the server) and does not make .Mac webmail more likely to discard similar messages in the future. There’s no way to use .Mac webmail to help train Mail’s spam filter, and no way to affect the way the .Mac mail servers themselves filter out spam.
In other words, they’re junk when it comes to junk. (I got another this morning, which was one of the image spam sort, pumping stocks. WHY are people so stupid as to buy those things??? Why??? It defeats me.)
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Palm is in trouble - the sort of trouble Apple was in around 1996 (1 June 2005; score: 24.41%)
- New Statesman on broadband infections; and getting bitten by the port 25 bug (27 August 2005; score: 21.8%)
- What we want for 419 spammers: randomly-generated gibberish (11 September 2006; score: 19.48%)
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October 30th, 2006 at 11:41 pm
What I’d love from .Mac mail is synchronised spam filtering with Mail on my machine. Mail learns what you class as spam. My copy is pretty well-trained now. I’d like whatever it’s learned to be uploaded to the server so that when the web mail client tells me I have new mail, it probably won’t be spam.
Still, that alone wouldn’t attract me enough to pay.
iWeb really sucks. As a client-side web developer I’m a bit biased, but really, there’s a million blogging tools that do a much better job of making the sites people want.
October 31st, 2006 at 7:05 am
For me it’s easy syncing, IMAP Mail and iDisk, in that order. The iDisk is handy - and the ability to access it anywhere from a web browser is a real bonus.
I stopped using HomePage when it turned into iWeb, which is truly disastrous.
October 31st, 2006 at 9:05 am
I never used to get any junk mail but recently image spam has been a problem. Simplest solution is to set up a rule to junk any email where the content type is multipart/related and the message is not addressed to my full name and the sender is not in my list of previous recipients. This works pretty well.
I’ve also downloaded a script that periodically empties my JunkMail box and forwards everything to ’spam’ at ‘mac.com’. Hopefully they will get the message about server-side filtering.
October 31st, 2006 at 9:48 am
Is it really likely that Gmail, which is free, has a smaller userbase than .mac mail, which seems to require payment?
October 31st, 2006 at 1:21 pm
True, Andrew, you might expect that, but don’t forget you’re talking about a product from Apple here, where people might pay for it no matter of its value. (And .Mac has a sneaky auto-renew thing going too.)
I’d be interested to see any stats that anyone has on the user bases for .Mac and GMail.
November 1st, 2006 at 11:56 am
I think I heard that the .Mac user base was around 500,000 users a year or so back. I can’t imagine it’s gone up since then.
November 1st, 2006 at 1:14 pm
OK, and this Times article from a year ago has “millions” of people signing up for Gmail. (Or Googlemail, as one should call it in the UK.)
Of course, Gmail will be optimised to scan the content (not just headers) of millions of messages and determine their spamminess from that. Compared to .Mac, which they’re probably just happy if it gets over.
My current count runs at 40 spams on .Mac and 3 on Gmail, while the proportion of “real” email coming in to both accounts is about 3:400. Gmail is streets ahead on spam, I reiterate.
November 5th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
You can call it GMail in the UK again. They did a deal with the people who complained that they owned the name.
GMail is an excellent spam filter. I use it to weed out junk that arrives through other addresses. It then forwards the genuine mail to my other POP accounts.
Maybe your Mac mail could run through a similar GMail filter. That would be instructive.
November 6th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
Thx Andy Miller for the .mac junk filtering advice. Like you Charles, I found it’s been getting increasingly annoying these past months.
I remember being pleased enough with .mac around three or four years ago - no junk - to start using it for all work related email. Now, I feel I may have made a mistake.
The problem is changing email addresses when your current one is pretty much crucial for work. I hate those please update your address book emails. How many editors are likely to bother updating address books etc.
July 31st, 2007 at 1:28 pm
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