Maintenance success: yahoo!

Post #433,886 by rcareaga 5/5/20 6:18:41 PM 5/5/20 6:18:41 PM Reply	Maintenance success: yahoo! I first went online rather late in the game, in 1987, when my estranged and soon to be ex-spouse granted me a bootleg account on a UC Berkeley server. Later on, I had recourse to such online channels as CompuServe, GEnie and (shudder) AOL. At the turn of this century, after the transition to broadband, I left the latter service behind and began receiving my email at Yahoo. Well, today I maintain four email addresses: one, with my service provider, which I employ for a very few specialized purposes; another, with Apple, that handles personalia involving my closest friends; a gmail account that includes, as well as friends, sundry entities with which I have regular contact for one reason or another; and Yahoo, which is the address I give out whenever I am obliged to in order to conduct online commerce or sundry other purposes. Yahoo’s spam routines are actually pretty robust: it’s rare that I ever see an invitation from some African exile or a bank clerk in Singapore summoning me to partake in wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, and the Russian beauties yearning for my hand in matrimony are doomed to languish, alas in Hormel Hell. Nevertheless, the ol’ inbox has been bulking up these many years with legitimate but unwelcome promotions from this or that entity, and the last time I looked in, I noticed that the total had climbed to just under 24,000 unread messages. I accordingly set aside most of a day last week to culling the herd of messages read and unread. There were a few of these—perhaps ten percent of the total inbox, going back to early in the Cheney Shogunate—that merited preservation, so of course I wanted to winnow out the preterite and retain the elect. Following a procedural false start that I shortly realized would consume days, I hit upon a more efficient means of slaughtering the unwanted emails, based on the fact that eighty percent of these were originating from the same fifteen or twenty sources, and although Yahoo’s procedures are cumbersome, I was nevertheless able over the course of the next few hours to shitcan the backlog. I still retain the address, and employed it even today in the course of a commercial transaction online, but now make it a practice to look in every day or two and sweep out the debris. Not that the backlog had been oppressing me, but it’s a minor relief to have it gone now. OTOH, both gmail and mac-dot-com are beginning to bloat… cordially,
Post #433,934 by scoenye 5/7/20 5:10:59 PM 5/7/20 5:10:59 PM Reply	Late? You were an early adopter. The internet as we know it didn't emerge for another 10 years for those outside major academia and .mil
Post #433,949 by pwhysall 5/8/20 2:41:16 AM 5/8/20 2:41:16 AM Reply	Re: Maintenance success: yahoo! I too have a clutch of email addresses. Outlook.com is my day-to-day, because of superior web interface and app support across all platforms, plus forename.surname at outlook.com is easy to relay verbally. I dislike Gmail's interface, but some people seem to send to that one, so I maintain it. I have another Gmail account that's not associated with my personal details that I used for forums logins, back in the day; it gets looked at perhaps once every six months. I don't use the email account provided by my ISP, although for historical reasons it forwards all mail to my Outlook account. Traffic on this account is mainly newsletters from which I haven't gotten around to unsubscribing. I think I've got a Yahoo! account. (just logged into it - LastPass knew the password, probably because of Flickr. No mail at all :D Man, that's a manky interface, although considerably less manky than the last time I looked, probably five years or more ago)
Post #433,973 by static 5/9/20 5:51:19 AM 5/9/20 5:51:19 AM Reply	GMail still has an IMAP interface. I don't go on the web version much; infrequently enough that it seems to be different every time I use it. Wade.
Post #433,974 by pwhysall 5/9/20 11:09:59 AM 5/9/20 11:09:59 AM Reply	Yeah nah You're correct that it has an IMAP interface, but because of GMail's demented labels system, the folders end up being all kinds of fucked up. There's two ways to use GMail and retain your sanity - the web, and the official app. I'm not even convinced of GMail through apps such as Apple Mail, Samsung Email, or Outlook - all of which, for services that aren't GMail, offer a superior mail experience.
Post #433,975 by malraux 5/9/20 2:29:58 PM 5/9/20 2:29:58 PM Reply	Used to use Apple Mail, now Spark Apple Mail crashes and eats RAM/CPU too often, but the interface is still the best. All with GMail. Who uses folders? That's what search is for. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #433,979 by Ashton 5/9/20 5:25:13 PM 5/9/20 5:25:13 PM Reply	"Apple Mail crashes and eats RAM/CPU" ..Hah! so it ain't just moi ..being Pun-ished :-þ ..but as you said ('Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln..') Moi Likes the ackshully-Intuitive layout; can abide the 'MTBF' of the kluge-y Rebuild aspect --so long as it remains Rare. (Or have I been running-on-Luck ?? ... scary, that) Still, not bad==since ''09: just Once. Seems magickal that it can (funnel-sort-simple? or Clever-Lads-grade) absurd amounts of detritus while searching for A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, Successfully. :-)
Post #433,980 by pwhysall 5/10/20 3:29:16 AM 5/10/20 3:29:16 AM Reply	People need to organise their shee; search isn't everything Everyone uses folders, Scott :) People use Gmail labels like they're folders, and that's how Gmail shows them to IMAP clients.
Post #433,988 by boxley 5/10/20 5:47:25 PM 5/10/20 5:47:25 PM Reply	everything comes to the in box, I am only interested in the wanted unread, search for anything else "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
Post #433,993 by malraux 5/11/20 9:47:55 AM 5/11/20 9:47:55 AM Reply	Yep. I may archive stuff to get it out of the way, but that's about it. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #433,994 by pwhysall 5/11/20 11:19:51 AM 5/11/20 11:19:51 AM Reply	I bet you people have disgusting bookshelves, too.
Post #433,997 by malraux 5/11/20 2:30:02 PM 5/11/20 2:30:02 PM Reply	No, but my searchable Kindle books don't need folders either. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #433,999 by pwhysall 5/11/20 5:05:42 PM 5/11/20 5:05:42 PM Reply	Searching only works when you know what you want to find.
Post #434,004 by malraux 5/12/20 10:51:45 AM 5/12/20 10:51:45 AM Reply	Usually a decent precondition for looking for something, yes. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #434,006 by Ashton 5/12/20 3:23:47 PM 5/12/20 3:23:47 PM Reply	Swinky-LRPD: This must be true. They made a bumper sticker.
Post #433,998 by boxley 5/11/20 3:08:33 PM 5/11/20 3:08:33 PM Reply	ya think? https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10217763032573296&set=a.2913078271792&type=3&theater I can put my hands on any particular title as needed "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
Post #433,981 by static 5/10/20 4:20:12 AM 5/10/20 4:20:12 AM Reply	I put up with the labels idiocy. I appreciate that they do the mapping, though. I don't do much email with that account, anyway, so don't do things like move email around. To be quite honest, IMAP is a bit of a mess of a protocol, but it's all we've got. Wade.
Post #434,074 by Another Scott 5/20/20 1:07:22 AM 5/20/20 1:07:22 AM Reply	IMAP... I've used POP3 at work for, um, a long time. Recently they made us transition to IMAP, which was a pain because I had a folder tree maybe 5 levels deep in POP3 in Thunderbird. Now we're being told that we're eventually are going to move to some sort of Outlook server and the folders are (apparently) even more limited, like no subfolders?? Yet another few dozen hours to reorganize my email to look forward to... Progress!!!11. :-/ Cheers, Scott.
Post #434,075 by static 5/20/20 2:36:30 AM 5/20/20 2:36:30 AM Reply	Outlook supports sub-folders. It has for many years. Not sure to what depth, but 5 is definitely supported. If they've somehow convinced Microsoft to let them disable sub-folders, you have someone in charge of IT who clearly likes to tell people how they are going to use things. That is not going to end well. Wade.
Post #434,076 by pwhysall 5/20/20 3:48:37 AM 5/20/20 3:48:37 AM Reply	POP3? That shit should have been taken out behind the barn a long time ago.
Post #434,104 by scoenye 5/21/20 8:18:33 PM 5/21/20 8:18:33 PM Reply	Some sort of Outlook server AFAIK, there's only one left standing and that is MS Exchange. It does subfolders and, again AFAIK, there is no way to turn that off. (I was the on-prem and later O365 Exchange admin at previous $employer. Never saw an option to do that and it would have led to mutiny if such a thing was enabled...) Public Folders perhaps? That is another story altogether. MS has been trying to kill those off and push everyone to Sharepoint for a decade.
Post #434,106 by Another Scott 5/22/20 8:13:23 AM 5/22/20 8:13:23 AM Reply	I've forgotten the details. And I may have garbled what I've been told. Indeed "we will be transitioning to a MS Exchange-based email system in the next few months"... I recently had to fix some signature and encryption certificates and set up Outlook as a client (for the first time ever). My local networking guru said I could continue to use IMAP Thunderbird (at least until the transition) but he said: "To avoid problems within Thunderbird, make sure that 'Server supports folders that contain sub-folders and messages' is unchecked in the Thunderbird settings." So, maybe the issue is that the future Exchange server (and/or IMAP) doesn't support mixing messages and subfolders in the same folder. That seems to be the (at least desired) case already. (I had no issues with this in POP3 and freely put subfolders and messages in the same folder, so of course I had hundreds of examples.) Anyway, maybe I'll be retired before the grand changeover happens... ;-) Thanks very much. Cheers, Scott.
Post #434,107 by pwhysall 5/22/20 9:39:05 AM 5/22/20 9:41:30 AM Reply	Exchange is awesome at folders. (ETA: and yes, Outlook/Exchange fully supports having folders and messages in the same container) Unfortunately, the world we live in means that for large organisations (and small tbh) the ability to enforce document and email retention policy (because lawyers) is paramount. Outlook/Exchange is a known-good solution to that issue. Edited by pwhysall May 22, 2020, 09:41:30 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #434,110 by Another Scott 5/22/20 12:45:47 PM 5/22/20 12:45:47 PM Reply	Thanks. I've been very happy with Thunderbird for ages, and while I see the advantages of IMAP I don't like the "can't put a message in a subfolder that has other subfolders" stuff limitation. I don't know if it's an e-mail archiving issue or what in our case, but it's annoying. Just today I read on Balloon-Juice that someone is having to rebuild their Outlook store because it got corrupted. After all these years, stuff like that continues to make me look less-than-happily on having to move. Maybe the Exchange Server is less fragile now... We'll see what happens. Exciting!!1 Thanks again. Cheers, Scott.
Post #434,114 by scoenye 5/22/20 6:03:29 PM 5/22/20 6:03:29 PM Reply	It is more an Outlook + Exchange thing v. IMAP Outlook + Exchange are joined at the hip and their native communication protocols are MS proprietary, not standard. IMAP, OTOH, is standard and so has to work across a swath of mail servers with varying capabilities. MS has never quite gotten a handle on the problems with Outlook's local mail stores. If you leave everything on the server, things work well. Enable syncing to local storage and things are bound to go off the rails. (And it is not limited to mail stores, the Global Address List is obnoxious too if local sync is enabled.)
Post #434,118 by rcareaga 5/22/20 6:46:53 PM 5/22/20 6:46:53 PM Reply	I’m gratified to have seeded a thread… particularly one within IWT’s initial remit, that has extended this far. cordially,
Post #434,132 by pwhysall 5/23/20 5:49:31 AM 5/23/20 5:49:31 AM Reply	Annoyingly, everything is proprietary now For statistically-significant values of "everything", that is :D Exchange and Gmail are both highly proprietary (despite both exposing kindasorta compliant IMAP interfaces), and they own roughly two-thirds of the email server market between them. Godaddy's mail hosting is in third place with another ~20% - it seems to be some IMAP/POP3 solution, but I can't find details.
Post #434,302 by jake123 6/3/20 9:04:24 AM 6/3/20 9:04:24 AM Reply	Coming late to the party but I can tell you that as a person that got to deal with godaddy mail not too long ago that it fuckin' blows.
Post #434,122 by static 5/22/20 7:56:48 PM 5/22/20 7:56:48 PM Reply	Sounds like it might be a subtle bug in Thunderbird. Years ago I talked the IT guy into telling me the name of the IMAP connector on our Exchange server. I connected quite happily with Opera's email client on Linux for quite a long time and had no problems with folders and messages in folders with sub-folders. Wade.
Post #434,123 by drook 5/22/20 10:01:48 PM 5/22/20 10:01:48 PM Reply	When connecting with MS using an open standard, I wouldn't assume the OSS app has the bug -- Drew
Post #434,126 by static 5/22/20 11:44:31 PM 5/22/20 11:44:31 PM Reply	Or could be two bugs, one in each. :-) IMAP is a fussy protocol, for all it is fully documented. I've written an IMAP server and yeah, we found bugs in a variety of clients. But I do agree with your sentiment. Least buggy IMAP server I've found was an open-source one, consciously written very closely to the spec. Wade.
Post #434,306 by Another Scott 6/3/20 11:27:28 AM 6/3/20 11:27:28 AM Reply	Found out the reason, finally... It has to do with the authentication that's required going forward. POP and IMAP can't do (or at least are not allowed to do) what is going to be required (P I V), so we're moving to Exchange. It's not clear whether Outlook is going to be required, or if that's only what's going to be supported. (Linux users are looking at other client options.) I pity the people who are having to study STIGs, though having it all written down in one place has advantages... Cheers, Scott.
Post #434,316 by boxley 6/3/20 3:23:37 PM 6/3/20 3:23:37 PM Reply	stigs are pretty dumb they have to be to deal with ISSO's "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

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