So Earthlink has gone batshit insane. They use blacklists that apparently think half the free world are spammers and as a result, I wasn't getting a lot of my mail. They were basically sending the e-mails into the bit bucket and sending a notice back to the people who e-mailed me. Sadly, since most people are illiterate when it comes to error messages, they saw something that looked like an "undeliverable e-mail" error and took it as such, without realizing that what the text of the message clearly said was actually "we think you're a dirty, filthy spammer, so you can just take your e-mail and toss off."

So I took Cringely's advice and went with Gmail. Not really his advice, but just his findings. Gmail is, for better or for worse, the most reliable e-mail service around, according to Cringely's testing. The web interface was pretty sweet. Accessing it through my MDA phone is quick as slick hell.

I lasted on it for two days.

The reason? Simple. Conversations.

The good thing Gmail does is group your e-mails together into Conversations. So if I send you an e-mail with the subject line of "Sup?" And you respond and then I respond, there's a very good chance the subject lines are then "Re: Sup?" So Gmail says, ah, you are conversing, let me put that in one long chain for you.

The bad thing Gmail does is group your e-mails together into Conversations without any thought process behind it whatsoever. I send off e-mails to publicists with the subject line of "Coverage." Any e-mail I get back or send with that subject line is now considered to be part of the same Conversation, regardless of who I sent it to or when I sent it. It will pull things out of my Archive and tag it with the Conversation.

Here's the kicker: once tagged as a Conversation, it can't be undone. Ever.

So rather than have a long ongoing Conversation that shouldn't be, I've plugged Gmail into Outlook and to hell with it.

Now, here's the fun part of techie bastards. If I were to take this to a support forum as a complaint/suggestion, I would get a lot of responses probably, and they would boil down to two basic types:

1) Limitation of the service. Maybe some day it will get fixed, maybe it won't. But that's the way the cookie crumbles right now.

B) Why would you want to send a bunch of e-mails to different people with the same subject line? I don't have that problem, but that's because I guess I can be unique in my subject lines.

The 1) people are reasonable. The B) people infuriate the shit out of me. Because they don't seem to understand what the world needs.

The world needs functionality. The world does not need us to conform to someone's idea of functionality.

Like with Windows XP. If it installs an update, it will constantly remind you to reboot. If you Google around, you will find lots of people who just say, Eh, go with it. Reboot. What's the big deal?

Well, the big deal, fuckers, is that I'm in the middle of something and I can't reboot right now. I'm not one of these dumbshits who will never reboot their machine–I don't need a reboot nanny. In fact, fuck it: I just don't feel like doing it right now. Why should I have to?

The point of technology is to add value, not to make us change our ways to conform to somebody else's idea of how something should work. The real winners in providing these services will let you roll your own thing however you want to do it. Which is probably why Wordpress works so well. If you can't do it out of the box, there's somebody who can tell you how (or a plugin).

What the hell was my point?

Oh yeah. My e-mail's working. That's it, I guess.