On Message with Ben Gross

Coding Horror: Designing For Evil: Jeff Atwood discusses some of the problems Craigslist has with spammers, some of the automated tools people can buy to spam Craiglist and some of the protections Craiglist has put in place to defended its community from spammers. Many of the problems and solutions apply to other community messaging systems.
Email [...]

Choosing the right email listserv: David Strom’s Web Informant provides a brief overview of free and inexpensive mailing list management tools suitable for individuals, groups, and small businesses. These services are often great improvements over attempting to manage a list directly from an email client. Strom is using Listserv in the generic sense as he [...]

I have been hosting my own DNS for at least a decade. I recently switched to DNS Made Easy and have been happy with the service. I have also used EveryDNS as a no-frills secondary DNS service for years and recommend it.
I began evaluating commercial DNS services and found DNS Made Easy. The management interface [...]

New Sites Make It Easier To Spy on Your Friends: The Wall Street Journal has a piece on services and social network tools that can be used and abused to discover and extract information about individuals that would often be difficult to obtain otherwise.
The Dark Side of Social Networking: Questions for Brant Walker: The Voice [...]

mail-trends: Mihai Parparita’s tool to let you analyze and visualize your own Google-based email collection. The software is still in its early stages and requires a Python installation and a Google Apps or Gmail account. Mail-trends is open source under the BSD license. Hopefully, Mihai will update the package to support other IMAP servers in [...]

Cory Doctorow: How to stop your inbox exploding: In the Guardian Cory writes covers a set of simple tips for keeping messages to your inbox to a minimum. The five tips are: Sort your inbox by subject, color-code messages from known senders, kill people who make you crazy, half-resign from mailing lists, and keep a [...]

Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami: Randall Stross at the New York Times writes a refreshingly entertaining piece on the often overdone topic of email overload. He provides nice comparisons the habits of Thomas Edison and H. L. Mencken for responding to the overload of communication in previous times.
Not Using Tweetscan to Manage Your Brand? [...]