Because of virus/malware distribution problems from infected machines, the security folks at the office are going to put out a workstation policy (the “part of the Windows operating system” kind) to shut down port 25, used by SMTP. Not blocking SMTP at the gateway or something like that. No, making all workstations unable to send things out on port 25.
Which will, essentially, put paid to my using an e-mail client, e.g., Thunderbird. I’ll have to instead use a web-based client — more, a web-based client that stores crap.
Like, possibly, GMail. Which would irk me mightily, if I ended up not being able to use my own freaking domain to receive and send mail from. Bleah.
Irked.
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You can always set up GMail to send from your domain address (it’s a drop down selection in the ‘from’ field), and set up the mail server for your domain to forward to GMail. That’s how I’ve got it set up, with GMail set up to give me the option of sending mail from the gmail address, average-bear, fireflywiki.org, and a couple other locations, depending on where I want/need the email to come from.
That makes the domain email address essentially a facade for the one-stop storage of GMail, yes. For me, that’s ideal, since I give out the gmail address to almost no one, and make the avereage-bear address more public (for doing online registrations and the like) — I prefer that as the temporary facade, since I can tear it down and replace it with a new one when the grafitti (spam) makes it unusuable (which happens invariably, given enough time).
That a great idea Doyce! Thanks for the tip I will have to look into doing this for the University email I forward to my Gmail account.
I’ve played with that idea before, Doyce — but on a “one-account” basis (e.g., trying to autoforward everything from “dave@etc.” to my gmail account). Unfortunately, I can’t explicitly set the default account name under the host to autoforward everything.
I *can* set up the whole domain to autoforward — but that only works going to a “real” domain, i.e., dave@ my domain would have to go to dave@ my new domain, ditto for margie@, etc.
Now, having said that, I’ve found the Forwarder cpanel control, and it *says* that everything going to dave@ is autoforwarding to my gmail.com account — but nothing now seems to be coming through.
…
Well, the server was having problems. And now, despite what used to be the case, it appears that everything to dave@ my domain is successfully autoforwarding to my gmail account. Hmmmmm …
Okay, now I’m having fun playing with this. And if, after a couple of days, all seems copacetic and working right — I may push all my Thunderbird stuff via GML into GMail, so I’ve got my full archive. Woot!
So far so good — things appear to be working with the autoforwarding and all.
A lot — a *lot* — less spam. Which is to be expected, perhaps (I was still processing a lot of that through and giving it a visual review — very few false positives, so that’s a good thing). But there’s still a weird sense that something isn’t getting through.
I’ve heard some push-back from the internal security folks — light, as I’m IT, too, and so professional courtesy is present, but distinct feedback that the only mail I really should be accessing is company mail and the only tool for using it should be Outlook or OWA. I was told how to work around it — but it’s one of those big “scrutinize me more closely” procedures that I’d rather not be labeled with.
That being the case, and as the Group Policy Object for this goes into effect tonight, I’ll have to do GML (which depends on SMTP) tonight, if I want to get my Tbird stuff in. I’m about 90% certain I want to do that (it’s about 1.2Gb, but could use some cleaning), but that would also let me free that space up on my PC, which would be a good thing, too.
One size fits all. That leads into the whole issue of how much control a smart company should exert over the flow of information to and from its top knowledge workers. Generally, less control = more zoom happ’nin in the brain of aformentioned workers. So lighten up, corporate dudes.
Well, can’t completely blame them in *this* context. There are plenty of tools for accessing e-mail, and the implicit message (which can be debated) is whether I should have my personal e-mail set up on the notebook for times when I’m not at work. (Though I have used Thunderbird’s IMAP ability to access work e-mail as well.)