I started this blog about a year ago. Initially, I just wanted a place to stick things so I’d be able to share them with friends and so I’d be able to find those things again later. From there, I started posting longer articles on products and services that I was really happy with. In December, at work, we launched TIBCO ActiveMatrix and I wrote about that a few times. Slowly, folks found my site and the traffic grew to about 70 unique visitors per day and 50 feed subscribers. Co-workers found the site and people started to mention it when I ran into them in the hallways.

With all this attention, I took a look at my site. Frankly, I was a little embarrassed. The site was painfully slow, the design was awful, and the content was all over the place. Looking around at some of the other sites out there, I had some ideas. I didn’t have the time or knowledge to do what I really wanted, but I did manage to improve things. The major changes include:

• faster web host
• latest version of Wordpress
• new site design
• separation of content into “sub-blogs”

As a result, things should work properly and I’m happy enough with the site that I’m comfortable posting content here again. Looking at what I was writing about, and looking at what people were interested in, I divided the site into three “sub-blogs”: (1) SOA, (2) Technology, and (3) Random Junk. If you’re interested in my technology related posts, just check out rourkem.com/tech. If you liked the SOA and TIBCO related posts, check out rourkem.com/soa. If you really want to read my food and travel related posts, there’s always rourkem.com/random. Of course, there’s always rourkem.com if you really want to read all of the above.

For each of the above sub-blogs, there’s a corresponding feed. Take a look at the above-listed pages and shift your subsciptions if one of the specific feeds is more appropriate to what you’re interested in. If you’re currently subscribed to the main site feed and only want the latest SOA posts, for example, go to rourkem.com/soa and subscribe to the feed listed in the sidebar on that page.

I’m not very happy with the theme, but it’s an improvement. Given the time, I’d love to build a new Wordpress theme based off Sandbox. For now, though, this should work.

• Category Based Permalinks with Wordpress
• Segmenting My Personal Blog - Why?
• Standalone List Items in IE and Firefox
• Feed to Email Service Roundup
• Feed Hacks: FeedShake and Feedcatch

If you scroll to the bottom of this post and click on the bottom screenshot you’ll have a good overview of the new interface. Move that window off to the side and refer back to it as you read this post and you’ll be able to easily see what I’m talking about.

All of the changes are to Smugmug’s picture gallery view, and most of those changes involve more use of AJAX. The biggest improvement, though, is actually not AJAX related — comments are now displayed on the picture pages by default. In the current production version of Smugmug’s galleries you have to click on comments to see them. Now those comments show up on the main page for each picture as you view that page. While a small change, this is a major improvement because it makes comments and user participation more central to the Smugmug experience. To make this feature complete, comments need to show up in the lightbox view — the view you get when you click on a picture, and the only view of a single picture that you’ll be able to email to someone.

I’d love to see Smugmug take this one step further and allow comments to be added to pictures without requiring users to click an “add comment” button. Blogs have comments set up this way. Yes, this would make the pages a little less “clean” looking, so perhaps this should be an option that users can control.

Smugmug’s display of EXIF information (metadata about photographs) has been a little clunky in the past, and this was one area where Flickr currently has the edge. The new Smugmug interface vastly improves handling of EXIF information. With this new interface you hover over a picture and toolbar appears. You then click “info” on that toolbar and a transparent element appears and hovers over your page. This element shows all the EXIF information for the image you’re viewing and can be moved around your browser window. The hovering EXIF element is really slick, but there are still some rough edges. The EXIF window shows far too much. At the very least, there should be a way to toggle between “basic” and “full” so you don’t need to see all of the information all of the time. Worse, though, is the fact that you can’t see this information when you click on a picture (enter lightbox mode) to get the larger version of that picture (see above right). If I’m interested enough in a picture to look at the EXIF information, I also want to see a larger version of that image than what you have on the default gallery view.

Smugmug caters to folks who are a little more serious about their photography than the crowd over at Flickr. Those same photographers are accustomed to magazines that list the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO in every photo’s caption. I wish Smugmug would do the same so I wouldn’t need to click anything to see basic shot information. I especially want to this information when I choose to look at a larger version of a given picture.

On a related note, I’d also like to have an option to view a version of pictures larger than “L”, or “Large,” version. I’d love to have a full screen view of images, even if it just gets my browser to scale the image down from an “XL” option. “L” images take up only a small part of my laptop screen (1400×1050) and “O” — for original — images are way too large.

The rest of the changes deal with modifying the gallery view so it requires fewer pageloads. This means that when you click on an individual image in a gallery it can grab that picture and show it without actually reloading the whole page. Individual photo pages load faster and everything seems snappier. The downside is that you won’t be able to copy a url out of your address bar and send it to someone to show them a specific picture. I’m really impressed with the fact that Smugmug made the lightbox view a permalink, so there’s a fairly easy way to send someone the url for a particular picture.

The one unresolved side effect of the new gallery view is the fact that you won’t be able to use a web site analytics service (like Google Analytics) to track individual pageloads.

Speed is important, and I really like the snappier interface. I’m also really impressed with the fact that you can now navigate using keyboard shortcuts. Arrow keys now move you forward and backward. I do hope, however, that Smugmug takes the required steps to give folks back what that snappier interface will take away. Enhancing the built-in Smugmug stats so there’s a list of “top photographs” will give users back the only valuable part of what they lost in terms of analytics.

Smugmug also improved the theme preview and theme selection for galleries. I still think the default Smugmug themes are the nicest, so I don’t really have an opinion on this feature.

I’m confident that the guys at Smugmug will clean things up some before this new interface goes from beta to full release. Overall, these changes are certainly taking Smugmug in the right direction and I’m very happy with the service. That said, I have a short list of items I’d love to see in a photo sharing and presentation service, including better access control, the ability to store digital negatives, and more ways to organize images.

Smugmug’s access control model is great for professional photographers, but its not as good for folks who want to share photos with family and friends. All of my photographs are currently open for all to see, but I’d really like the ability to lock that down so only my “showcase” photographs are public, and the rest (Christmas picture, vacation pictures, etc) are only viewable by friends and family. More and more, I wonder about the wisdom of leaving all of my pictures open to the general public. Sharegroups are not an acceptable answer to this problem.

Smugmug almost provides a great way to archive my pictures. Because Smugmug only allows me to upload JPEG files, though, I need to keep a mirror of my galleries offline with all of my RAW files, or “digital negatives.” The ability to link a digital negative — stored by Smugmug — to each JPEG would be a great feature. I’d be willing to pay extra for that.

As I upload more and more pictures to Smugmug, it becomes harder and harder to find things. Search is good, but the ability to put photo galleries in multiple categories would open up quite a few organizational possibilities. Smugmug announced a feature some time ago would use the data information in my pictures to help organize those pictures. I have no idea how this works because despite numerous requests to support this feature remains unavailable to me. Oh, well.

• What Makes Pikeo Different?
• PicLens Almost Fixes Slideshows

Why the new service, then? Why the positive coverage from Techcrunch? Let’s say I run a softball league and I need a way to send schedules, results, and schedule change notifications out to all the players. Unless I’m particularly tech savvy, I’m not likely to think to myself, “why don’t I sign up for a blogger account, burn the feed using Feedburner, and then use the Feedburner email subscription option. Each of my posts will then be sent out to all the players who subscribe.” I am far more likely to use a service like Loopnote that is sold as a way to send notifications.

Loopnote not only makes it clear to the average Joe what you can do with the service and why you would want to do it, Loopnote also makes that one particular thing easy to do. They market to a specific use case and optimize the user experience to that use case. It makes sense when you think about it.

Solutions selling, in enterprise software, is exactly the same thing.

As a technologist, its too easy to fall into the trap of only looking at a given technology not the real world problems that technology solves.

The Techcrunch article fails to point out the fact that Smugmug has been doing the map thing for a couple of years now. In fact, if you scroll down to the bottom of my Smugmug page, you’ll see that I’ve been annotating my pictures with geography data since the folks at Smugmug got the usability nailed. Photo maps are fun, both so you can see where you’ve been in the world and also so you can see pictures other people have taken in a given location.

Poor Smugmug rarely gets noticed in these articles because they aren’t effectively targeting the mainstream Internet user. Smugmug’s focus is on clean, quality presentation of your pictures over bells and whistles. To compound that, Smugmug seems to do nearly no marketing or its service. Why do I use Smugmug? The JPEGs Smugmug generates are of very high quality, the default background is black, the slide shows are full screen, and you have complete control over your prints. Heck, even the photo print service Smugmug uses is top-notch to the point where they’ll do color matching. For those reasons, I’d never use Flickr or Pikeo. The ability to highly customize my Smugmug pages is just a bonus I barely take advantage of.

I do like to poke around and see what’s out there, though. I have a Flickr account, and I just signed up for a Pikeo account and gave it a quick try. My reactions? The flash based interface is pretty, but seems very sluggish and buggy (at least in Firefox). At first I thought the whole thing was broken, but it got better after I logged out and logged back in…

Uploading was really easy; the friendliest I’ve seen. Adding tags is also the clearest I’ve seen. I like the fact that they’ve formally broken the tags down into “who,” “what,” and “where” — I’ve informally been tagging (keywording) my Smugmug pictures that way for some time. Map locations are associated with descriptive tags, which makes it easier to assign the same location to a bunch of pictures. On the other hand, the album feature is very confusing. It’s clearly there just so you can group a bunch of pictures and send out a link to those pictures or the slide show for those pictures, and not as a central way of organizing your pictures. Oddly, though, you won’t be able to explain individual pictures well, because captions seem to be completely missing.

Overall, the interface feels like a rich client application more than a web application, albeit a sluggish client application. I like that. Flickr and Smugmug are getting more AJAX-y every day, but neither is close to where Pikeo is right now.

Sharing your pictures or albums will need to be via email, though, as feeds also appear to be completely missing. No feeds? That seems a major omission in this day and age. Getting at a reasonably large version of the picture also seems to be impossible. The largest I can see the image is the size you see above in that screenshot. Even in slideshow the images are roughly that size.

The social stuff is even more front and center than what you’d find on Flickr. You’re presented with other people’s pictures and tags as soon as you log in. Smugmug could use a little more of that, as right now there’s none. I wouldn’t mind seeing my friends’ most popular pictures, for example.

Overall, though, I prefer Flickr for a site of this type. Flickr is cleaner, faster, and more full featured. I’ll still take Smugmug over both of them for clean, large, nice presentation of my pictures.

That said, Pikeo and Flickr both have one feature that I’d very much like to see in Smugmug, and that’s smart access control for your photos. Smugmug allows you to hide your pictures (anyone with a URL can see them, but they don’t show up on the main page), password protect your pictures, or make your pictures public. Both Pikeo and Flickr take the right approach and allow you to designate your pictures as public, family only, friends and family, or public. Flickr even allows you to subscribe to a feed for your Friends’ photos, regardless of whether or not those photos are public or friends-only.

• PicLens Almost Fixes Slideshows
• Smugmug Testing AJAX'ier Interface

An instant messaging blog posted a preview of the next release of Trillian yesterday. As a longtime user of Trillian, I was interested in what the folks are Cerulean are working on. A single multi-protocol IM client is essential. My friends, like most, aren’t just using one IM network and seem to be spread across AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, and Google Talk. When I chose Trillian it was the only game in town for multi-protocol IM and I was really happy that the folks at Cerulean recognized the need for such a product. Recently, I’ve been a little less enthusiastic.

There have been multi-protocol IM clients for years now, but despite competition there hasn’t been much innovation. Adium X, for Mac OS only, seems to be the only company really pushing the envelope.

The single-network clients, on the other hand, have some nice features I’d love to see multi-protocol versions of in Trillian. Even without coming up with truly new features, bringing the innovations that AOL and Google have added to the multi-protocol IM world would make Trillian worth paying for. Heck, I’d move to GAIM if they built this stuff first, and I’m a paying Trillian Pro customer today. After reading about Astra, I’m worried that the Trillian Pro folks missed the ball.

Trillian 4.0 will be chock full of trendy “Web 2.0″-style social features. You’ll be able to create a webpage that is your “one home on the web,” linking to blogs, social networking sites, and providing information about you gathered from your computer. You’ll get to see what the weather is where your friends live and what CDs they’re listening to. You’ll get to see where your friends are if they’re traveling.

So what? Am I the only one who doesn’t want my computer to tell my friends’ everything about me automatically? I want an IM client that does instant messaging and does it really well across all applicable mediums. I want all the features folks using AOL IM and Google Talk get, only across all of these IM services. The top of my wishlist looks like so:

• Inline spellcheck without the need for a plug-in
• Online contact list with group and renaming support
• Web based client for sending and receiving IMs
• Standards-based secure IM support, preferably OTR
• Centralized online logging that is as searchable as GMail
• Mobile device clients (Blackberry in particular)

Yes, I’m a 30-something professional who uses IM for both work and fun. Yes, I’m lame and don’t care about video chat, “buzzing” people, MySpace, or what music my friends are listening to. I’m not alone, though. More and more people are using IM, and after age 22 they tend to care less and less about MySpace and Facebook. More people are being introduced to instant messaging at work. A client that supports SIP well (Exchange’s IM protocol, and Trillian supports this today via a plug-in) and also supports AOL IM and Google Talk well has real value. An common online contact list and online logging at work and at home is even better. The ability to log in from a public terminal at the airport or a trade show and have access to all that same stuff? Golden.

I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Even more important than the above list of new features is broad and solid support for as many IM platforms as possible. Cerulean has done a great job with Trillian here. Astra continues that with native Google Talk support, MySpace IM support (even if I don’t care), and an even easier API for building communications protocol plugins. Even today, Cerulean’s library of plugins for IM platforms is the best out there. I’m very happy to see that trend continuing.

As for the rest, I could be wrong. Astra might have all the features on my wish list and more. I hope so. I posted these as feature requests on the Cerulean blog, so we’ll see if the folks on the Trillian team have anything to say.

I found an interesting Alexa graph comparing web traffic for the top five services — Feedburner isn’t isn’t in this chart because the majority of traffic to Feedburner’s website is related to their feed syndication service. The Alexa chart should be a reasonable indicator of market share for these providers.

Everyone knows Feedburner, the new service that created a new category of service. Not too long ago, Feedburner started providing feed to email service only as part of their feed syndication service. If you’ve already “burned” your feed then it’s very easy to add email subscription capability. Everything is done very well, and this service has all the features a publisher would want: good scriptlet and subscription interface, subscribers counted in Feedburner subscriber stats, and control over the subscriber list. For the subscriber, the messages are full-text, clean and easy to read, and the from and subject fields look pretty nice (from is blog name, and subject is “the latest from <blogname>”). Posts are not real time — they seem to go out once a day and multiple posts from the same day end up in the same email. This service is 100% free.

If I were not already a Feedburner user, I would not sign up just for the email publication capability. However, I am a Feedburner user and this is the service I use to email-enable my blog. Feedburner is so good at doing so many things that I would advise you to take a look at this service before moving on and looking at the alternatives.

FeedBlitz is the first major provider of this service (bloglet has expired) and is clearly the most popular according to the Alexa numbers linked above. As a publisher using FeedBlitz you have all the same features you’d have with FeedBurner, but with a less clean message template (changeable if you’re willing to pay) and with another service provider to keep track of even if you already syndicate through Feedburner. Service is tiered; with a free account you get no customization and your messages will be sent out to users once a day. If you chose to pay for the “turbo” features you get real-time generation of messages (they even accept pings), customized subject and field (otherwise the sender is “FeedBlitz”), and a completely customizable email template. There’s also some nice reporting for publishers.

For subscribers looking for a feed to email service, FeedBlitz is the only provider that sends all of your feed items out as once daily digest. Quite a few people complain about the single digest approach, but this is both a limitation and a truly unique feature. No other service can be configured to create these digests. For someone who doesn’t want a feed reader but doesn’t want a pile of individual email items filling up their inbox, this could very well be a helpful feature.

For subscribers looking to use FeedBlitz to power a good number of feeds, FeedBlitz is a feature-rich feed subscription service offering OPML import/export, the ability to pause and “diagnose” feeds, and more. FeedBlitz also offers “Feed Advisor,” a feature meant to point you towards other feeds you might find interesting based on the activity of the user community. Feed Advisor, unfortunately, means more junk the messages you receive if you’re a for-free users.

I find Squeet very similar to FeedBlitz — different when it comes to the details, but overall: unique interface, good publisher features, reporting, import and export of OPML, and a Feedburner partner.

Unlike FeedBlitz, Squeet is 100% free. Publishers can not chose to customize the email that gets sent out. While there is quite a bit of support for reporting, the publish end of Squeet is a bit weaker than that of FeedBlitz. I don’t see any reason a publisher would choose Squeet over FeedBlitz.

On the other hand, the “Squeet Reader” is quite powerful and has obvious advantages over Squeet for all but users who want a digest combining all blog posts from a day into one big email. Subscribers can chose how often they want to receive messages for a given feed — from whenever there’s a change to once a day. If you chose once a day, Squeet will “digest” all the messages for that feed, but will not combine multiple feeds into the same email messages. The interface for managing your Feeds is quite nice, with some pretty usable AJAX’y stuff. The only downside to using the “Squeet Reader” is the message format — all messages arrive in a very busy HTML format with extra junk to support Squeet’s “Feed Advisor”-like feature.

Zookoda does not belong in this review. This company clearly falls into a different category — they have no functionality for the reader at all, and on the publication side they are best described as an RSS enabled email newsletter / marketing application. If you’re interested in sending out email newsletters that include information that can be gathered from RSS feeds, take a look.

Rssfwd would be my choice if I were going to subscribe to a couple of feeds via email. This service publishes new posts to a feed as individual messages using the cleanest email message format of any service out there (from is the blog name and subject is the name of the post). Rssfwd even sends the email as both HTML and plain text so it can be easily consumed via blackberry or other mobile device. The plain text email is well done, with annotations for all links.

Why wouldn’t I subscribe to a whole list of feeds with rssfwd? There’s no OPML import or export, so you can’t easily move a list of subscriptions onto or off of the service. There’s no control panel that can be used to manage your subscriptions, either — you unsubscribe by clicking a link in an email generated for a given feed by rssfwd.

It’s worth mentioning that rssfwd is open source and written in Ruby on Rails. If you’re adding rss to email functionality to your Ruby on Rails application you might want to look at rssfwd.

R-Mail really managed to rub me the wrong way — the front page has ads all over it, the signup confirmation message was blocked by my spam filter because of an improper HELO, the emails used to have Amazon ad-footers (now they contain feed recommendations), and the R-Mail blog contains entries directly bashing the competition. All that aside, this service is very similar to rssfwd in that it provides RSS users with an easy way to receive a feed via email. The email messages are nearly as clean as those generated by rssfwd (they add the word R-Mail to the subject and don’t have as nice an all text version) and, similar to rssfwd, there’s no fancy web interface and no publisher features but unlike rssfwd, R-Mail does offer OPML export. Further, R-Mail is a Feedburner partner, is aggressively adding features, and seems to be growing very rapidly. Today I prefer rssfwd, but R-Mail is worth watching.

Both R-Mail and rssfwd include examples of how a publisher could add a “subscribe now” widget to their web page. Rssfwd also has a bookmarklet for subscribing to feeds, but its not as friendly as it could be.

What about all the the Rest? Queoo appears to be an eternal work in progress with nothing functioning properly. Various reviews out there name Yutter a great service and a real up-an comer in this space, however Yutter seems to have failed already. Today the front page of Yutter is a full-page ad and there’s a note saying that it will be a different ad each month. Mailfeed has also vanished. QuickThreads is a subscriber focused service that has ugly feed messages, only allows four subscriptions for free, and doesn’t publish complete articles.

Summary: If you’re a publisher and want to give your subscribers an easy way to receive your content via email, use the Feedburner email publication option. If you’re an RSS user and you want to receive just a few feeds via email then look to rssfwd. If you’re an RSS subscriber and you plan to use one of these services as your primary way of reading feeds, Squeet is your best bet.

• Feed Hacks: FeedShake and Feedcatch
• BigString Allows You to Send Your Email as Images
• Please Excuse the Mess
• Why Tuffmail for IMAP?
• Why I don't use GMail

If you don’t need 250GB of storage, combining the Nexto OTG enclosure with the Hitachi TravelStar 4K120 is a really good option at a total of just under $250 (less than an 8GB CF card). The 4K120 has the best combination of space (120GB), power consumption, and shock resistance of any PATA drive out there. Some folks on dpreview.com’s forums have reported 60GB worth of transfer on a single battery charge due to the low power consumption of the 4K120.

I’d love to buy the top-of-the-line Epson P-4000, but I there’s no way I can justify $550 for 80GB. From what I’ve read, the Nexto OTG is as fast, reliable, and functional for downloading and storing images. The extra $300 seems to be the cost to review your images on the go.

References:

• Review of the Nexto OTG (ND-2300) and comparison to Nexto CF (ND-2500)
• EastGear has the best price I’ve seen, and free shipping

Collections of low traffic feeds: Quite a few of my friends publish photos to online galleries, and each of these galleries has a feed. The problem is that these are all very low traffic feeds. If you add feeds like this to My Yahoo!, they take up quite a bit of room and mostly contain links that are very old. Sure, you can set My Yahoo! to only show items newer than a week, but that way you end up with a long list of empty topics. Unsightly, and still too real-estate intensive. The same holds true for the long list of very low volume blogs my friends maintain. But… if you add all those feeds as one merged, FeedShake feed you end up with something like what you see to the right. Much easier on the eyes.

Creating a master feed like this also allows me to maintain these master feeds in one place and then subscribe to that feed in a number of different places. If, for example, my wife has a subscription to our friends’ photo galleries it will automatically get updated whenever I update the master subscription.

I treat Flikr feeds a little differently because they publish each and every photo as a separate item (Smugmug, on the other hand, publishes new albums as a single entry). Flikr provides a way to subscribe to a unified feed for all of your friends in My Yahoo!, so there’s no need for FeedShake here, right? Interestingly, creating my own unified field for Flikr contacts ended up getting me more items and much less wasted space than using the built-in Flikr functionality. In the relevant screenshot to the left, the Flikr feed is the longer one with more wasted space to the right of the FeedShake feed.

Unified personal feed: Quite a few people I know have a number of different feeds. At minimum, it seems like everyone has a blog feed and a photo feed of some sort. In addition, many folks also have del.icio.us bookmark feeds, music feeds, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could easily splice all these feeds together into one merged feed that friends could easily subscribe to? FeedShare will let you do that.

Monitoring feeds for keywords: FeedDemon users know all about this. Using Watches in FeedDemon you can easily monitor one or all of your feeds for keywords and get alerted when matches occur. I use this to monitor posts in online bulletin boards for messages of particular interest. The problem is that (1) you can only do this if you’re paying for FeedDemon and (2) it only works when you’re sitting at your computer. Now, with FeedShake I can do this in a more configurable way online and make it available in Google Reader or via a feed to email service to insure I don’t miss a match.

Insure you don’t miss any feed items: Most feeds don’t keep more than the newest 15 to 20 items in the feed at any given time. If you’re using one of the online feed readers, chances are they it won’t keep anything older than what is still available in the feed. This is fine if you’re subscribed a blog like this, where I normally don’t post more than two items in a given week. But, if you’re subscribed to a really busy feed and they push 30 items in a day or two then you’re only going to see the last 20 or so. Flikr is a perfect example of this. Often folks will post a whole mess of pictures (think 40+), but if you’re subscribed via the normal feeds it looks to you like they’ve only published 15 at a time. Feedcatch will monitor the feed constantly and keep all of the items for you. This way you never miss an item.

Summary: FeedShake and feedcatch are interesting new services that open up quite a few potential feed related mashups. Neither is a refined product yet, so don’t expect a clean or seamless experience. The UI for FeedShake is awful — you enter all the feeds you want to combine in a single small text field with spaces between each url. There also seems to be inconsistent truncation of feeds. My “Friends’ Blogs” feed shows full entries, while my attempt at a unified feed for myself resulted in truncated entries and a corrupt RSS 2.0 feed. Expect both services to improve with some time and as people start to use them more and more.

• Feed to Email Service Roundup
• Please Excuse the Mess

• amazing spam protection
• reliability
• responsive and helpful live support
• feature, features, features
• vision (RoundCube, LDAP, SynchML)

There’s an active community of email fanatics out there, so I had a number of resources to fall back on when investigating imap providers. The single most helpful site was Nancy McGough’s IMAP write-up and list of providers at Infinite Ink. Nancy’s blog also has some really good posts on things like spam filtering with sieve and IMAP tagging. The folks and the archives over at emaildiscussions.com were also really helpful in nailing the fine differences between the various services. The reliability stats someone posted helped quite a bit, for example. Someone at MIT also did a great job summarizing some of the features in the top five services out there in an easy to read chart. My bookmarks on this topic are all here.

I signed up for trial accounts with fastmail, tuffmail, and runbox. In the end, I chose tuffmail based on my experience using all three via those trial account. Tuffmail made my decision easy — the spam protection by itself was so far ahead of the others that I was sure from about two days into the evaluation process.

Tuffmail does everything you can imagine to protect users from spam. To start with, they do an amazing amount of filtering at the MX level — before your mail has even been accepted by their mail servers. In the screenshot to the left you can see the configuration options available for each email address. The level of restriction is adjustable for each individual email address rather than at the mailbox or account level. Allow and deny lists can be configured per address, per domain, and per account. These white/blacklists can also be enforced either at the MX level or via a scoring modifier which then feeds into SpamAssassin. Check out tuffmail’s website for more information on the MX level spam filtering.

Once the email has been accepted by tuffmail’s servers, SpamAssassin (SA) takes over. Tuffmail users have very detailed control over how SA scores and deals with your incoming mail, including what it does to the headers, and how it delivers mail that scores higher than the two user-defined thresholds. If the tuffmail MX filtering and SpamAssassin aren’t enough protection, you can also set up user-level bayes filtering (much like DSPAM). As you can see from the diagram to the right, you have very detailed control over what happens when the bayes filter tags a message as spam or ham. The best part, though, is the fact that you get to train the bayes filter yourself without needing to interact with the web interface. You simply move improperly identified messages into Auto-Train/Spam or Auto-Train/Ham folders and the tuffmail server takes care of the rest.

Still not enough Spam protection? Tuffmail scans all email with either ClamAV or Sophos. Still not enough? You can add your own custom rules using Sieve filters and not only filter out more “spam,” but also filter mail into different folders or auto-tag mail based on where it came from(eg: list mail and automated reports).

I use every bit of spam protection tuffmail has to offer, and I’m satisfied. My only Sieve rules are used to block messages from big companies that claim to allow unsubscribe. This can be done with an allow list, but it was easier for me to bulk-add the list as as Sieve filter. Right now, I’m down to less than 10 spam messages in my inbox a week with zero false positives. I could have zero spam in my inbox, but I prefer to have none of my legitimate mail blocked.

Tuffmail also generates very detailed reports which allow you to see what mail is getting blocked at the MX level. These reports can be emailed to you nightly, or you can just go view them on the tuffmail website. The current day’s report is real-time, so you can check that report if you’re not receiving an email message that you expect. If the message is being blocked or slowed down (by greylisting) then you can just add the sender as an allowed sender and you’re good to go.

Reliability is perhaps the only thing more important than great spam filtering. I poked around a bit and found some discussion on emaildiscussions.com where folks were discussed reliability of the leading imap providers. One person even posted an uptime report. By all measures, tuffmail is the reliability king. Fastmail was a close second, but a month after I signed up for tuffmail, fastmail suffered extensive downtime. I was happy to be a tuffmail customer.

Tuffmail has quite an extensive list of features — all the standard stuff, and a whole host of things unique to tuffmail. Security features are fully represented, with secure connections for everything. The auto-BCC function allows me to easily save a copy of all outgoing mail no matter where I send it from. Auto-delete is a handy way of making sure List and Junk folders don’t get too big. The ability to send and receive messages up to 100MB means that I never have to worry about email bouncing because my provider couldn’t handle the size.

I have two tuffmail mailboxes right now; one for me and one for my wife. Tuffmail allows me to control both mailboxes from one login to the admin interface in a very clean and logical way. This made so much sense that I was shocked to see it missing in the other two services I tried. Check out tuffmail’s website for a complete list.

It is generally not a good idea to chose a product or service based on what the vendor is planning to do in the future. I didn’t chose tuffmail purely based on their vision because I would’ve chosen them simply based on everything above. I am, though, glad to see that tuffmail has looking ahead and is trying to find ways to make email that much better. For examples, tuffmail has a beta version of the RoundCube webmail client running in a “beta” web client area so folks can try it now. Tuffmail is also looking at LDAP and SyncML for addressbook synchronization. These are features I’d very much like to see in the future, and no one has them today.

Is tuffmail perfect? No, they’re not. The administrative interface is complex and hard to use. At least that complexity is somewhat mitigated by the excellent online documentation and the amazingly responsive support staff at tuffmail (every question I asked got a detailed response within a couple of hours). Fastmail offers file storage and web hosting, while tuffmail is pure email. I don’t see this as a bad thing — I’d rather use another provider for web hosting and file storage. Tuffmail’s indexing needs to happen more often so searches don’t return stale results.

All that said, though, tuffmail is as close to perfect as you can expect to find in an email provider. Without a doubt, my tuffmail account is the best email account I’ve ever had.

• Why I don't use GMail
• BigString Allows You to Send Your Email as Images
• Feed to Email Service Roundup

The major providers of web based email have come a long way in the last couple of years. Most of the major objections I had to using web based mail — the speed, content page reloading, and lack of ability to use hotkeys — are gone from the big name offerings today. Of these, GMail is definitely the most palatable of the current web-based email services. Don’t get me wrong, the new Yahoo! mail is slick, but I prefer the speed and simplicity of the GMail interface. Even with GMail, though, there are some major things that you can do still can’t do:

• Take advantage of advanced SPAM filtering
• Take your email offline with you (eg: on an airplane)
• Synchronize email with a mobile device
• Perform in-line spell check (Firefox 2.0 will fix this)
• Synchronize your address book across business email, personal email, and mobile device

SPAM is huge problem. My email address is nearly 10 years old, so SPAM is a truly serious problem for me. With no SPAM protection, I’d get thousands of junk mail a day. GMail helps reduce that to under one hundred SPAM messages a day, but that isn’t enough. There’s a major market around SPAM protection, with a rich collection of services and software geared at dealing with SPAM. By not locking myself into a web based email service I can take advantage of those services and software packages.

I fly quite a bit. Spending large chunks of my time on airplanes means I need to be somewhat productive and therefore look for tools that allow me to do things while offline. This post, for example, was produced by Windows Live Writer while on an airplane. Email is no exception — I want to be able to clean out my 100+ message inbox by reading, responding to, and deleting email while offline. Services that expose my email via IMAP allow me to do this, while the major web based services expose my email via POP, at best. POP allows me to download a copyof my inbox, but does not allow for synchronization. IMAP access also allows me to synchronize my inbox with my Blackberry, rather than simply forwarding email the device. Synchronization means that when I read or delete messages on my Blackberry they get marked read or deleted in my desktop and web based inboxes.

Keeping my address book up to date in one place is hard enough. I constantly forget to update email addresses and contact information. There is no possible way I’d keep multiple email addresses books in sync. One option would be to just update a master address book and do a regular import / export to the other places I need the information. The problem is, manual processes like that have a habir of never happening for me. Automatic synchronization is what I’m looking for. Doing this via an open standard like LDAP would be the best solution, but I wasn’t able to find software and services that would allow it. I use Plaxo, which provides me with synchronization, web-based access to my address book, and an automated way to get my contacts to update their own entries. There’s no way to synchronize Plaxo and a service like GMail.

In addition to the real deal-breakers mentioned above, using an IMAP based email client is still a more pleasant experience and allows for a much deeper level of customization than with the web based equivalents. For example, I really like the three pane vertical layout that’s possible in Outlook and Thunderbird. Thunderbird also allows you to add extensions to do things like rapid text substitution (Quicktext), easily toggling of message headers (Headers Toggle), and rapid filing of messages to folders from the keyboard (QuickFolders). Lastly, with a for-pay service you are not subjected to advertisements pasted all over everything.

Of course, there is a trade-off. The web based interfaces offered by GMail and Yahoo! mail are nicer than the web interfaces offered by the for-pay IMAP service providers. The open-source software used by these IMAP providers is, however, catching up. In particular, RoundCube is an open source AJAX webmail client with a very nice interface that, with some more polish, could easily compete with the major providers out there. GMail and Yahoo! are also free and offer a truly enormous amount of storage. By comparison, TuffMail (my email provider) charges $28/year for 1GB of storage and $68/year for 4GB (a little more than the amount GMail offers for free).

GMail has a unique advantage, even among large, free, web-based email providers. GMail’s search capability is extremely fast and extremely intuitive. I’m particularly fond of the the fact that I don’t need to specify which fields in a message GMail should search when I enter the search term. Tuffmail, as well as some of the other high quality for-pay IMAP service providers, are starting to catch up. Right now, though, the search interfaces offered are not as nice, and the results either do not come back as quickly or are not as up to date (indexing occurs less often). For this reason I’m still forwarding a copy of all my email (received or sent) to GMail so I can easily search it. As I spend most of my time dealing with my email in Thunderbird, the ability to perform a search from within Thunderbird would be very nice.

Free, web-based email has come a long way over the last few years. Among such services, GMail is particularly attractive. A for-pay version of GMail offered IMAP would be a truly attractive offering, but is unlikely given Google’s current business model. In the absence of such an offering, there’s still a very real need for the boutique for-pay IMAP providers.

• Why Tuffmail for IMAP?
• BigString Allows You to Send Your Email as Images
• Feed to Email Service Roundup