What is your MTG color?

Don't play Magic: The Gathering much any more, but a friend sent me this link and I couldn't help but check it out.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Sadly, I see myself as more blue (of course without the deceit part).

Gmail plus-addressing vs Yahoo Mail's AddressGuard

For several years now, I've been paying for my Yahoo Mail account for a single feature: AddressGuard. I've become really dependent upon it, using it for nearly every website I have an account with.

Recently when my Yahoo Mail account came up for renewal, I looked at Google's plus-addressing. I like plus addressing, but for me it fails in two areas:

1. you use your account name before the plus part (ie accountname+plus@gmail)
2. not all sites accept email addresses with a plus in them

accountname before the plus

AddressGuard uses a self-selected, unrelated word for the part before the plus, and then you append a -disposable after (ie selfselected-disposable@yahoo.com). You must manually create every disposable AddressGuard email address, and selfselected@yahoo.com doesn't exist. This makes it much harder (impossible?) for sites to circumvent this filtering and/or associate the disposable address with the receiving account. With plus-addressing, any site could simply drop the +plus part and have the email match different filters and potentially be delivered. Over time you could filter the cruft based on From: addresses, but that's a hassle

plus in email address considered invalid

I'm really surprised by the number of big name sites out there that see an email address with a + in it as invalid. This is really disappointing, and it does make plus-addressing much less appealing.

what I did

To more closely match the functionality of AddressGuard, I setup two google accounts. The first is where I send all my emails. This account is created with a generic word not associated with me. To keep with the example above, I'll use accountname@gmail.com. In this account, I setup a filter to forward everything back to my second account, which is my real gmail account. For illustration, I'll call that realaccount@gmail.

If I want to block some incoming mail, I do that at the accountmail level. I do all my other filtering at the realaccount level. This does a pretty fair job of emulating AddressGuard, and it's free.

There isn't much I can do to solve the second problem. Everytime I run into a site that doesn't support plus-addressing, I send a note into their support email address. Over time I imagine there will be more support for it.

In the end I've renewed my yahoo account for another year to give me time to completely migrate to gmail.

Introduction

Welcome to My So Called (Computing) Life

For a while, I've been working on projects that have either produced "cool" results or would have been easier if I'd been able to find help via a google search. So this is the place I can write-up those results and share them with you.