[OT?] HTML email is evil - or, why we get so much spam

[Bernard Devlin]

Chipp said:
 >>
I'm with Mikey. I finally broke down and forwarded all my email  
addresses to my Gmail account.
<<

Well, I thank you all for the Gmail recommendation - I hadn't looked  
very deeply into using Gmail before.  However, there are still a  
couple of issues for me

1) When I first started using the internet, I got an account with  
Netscape, and I used that for many years.  As I started to join more  
and more mailing lists in the past 5 years, I came to rely on Notes  
more and more as my email client.  My current mail database contains  
over 200,000 emails (and that is with all spam removed).  I have an  
encrypted copy on my laptop, and I have two replica copies on cheap  
Linux servers on the internet.  I can be using any computer on my LAN  
and can connect to my server-based copies and search through all  
200,000 emails in a matter of 5 seconds.  I have a Gmail account that  
has only 2000 emails in it, and I find that it takes as long to  
search through a mere 2000 emails.  How people find Gmail performs  
when they are searching through a couple of hundred thousand emails?   
Does the Gmail search scale?  Being Google, I'm hoping it does.

2) As time went on, I used Netscape less and less.  However, what I  
did was to cc stuff to myself there that I really, really didn't want  
to lose (stuff like license keys).  About a year ago, Netscape re- 
vamped their email app to make it more Ajaxy (and incidentally make  
it worse in some ways).  When I logged in, all my email was gone.   
When I wrote to them a couple of times to complain about it, they  
didn't even bother to reply.  That makes me very wary of ever  
trusting my email to a single source.  I lost all that license key  
data and 5 years of personal emails.  Luckily the license key info  
had generally been received into my Notes database and replicated to  
my servers.  But those personal emails are gone forever.

You might wonder why someone needs to keep so many old emails.  Most  
of them are from user-lists of various technologies I use.  I like to  
keep my own archive because one never knows what will happen to  
archives under the control of other people.   As I pointed out  
before, Google used to archive this userlist very well, but something  
has gone awry with that in the last year, so now I always just search  
my own archive.  Also, there are other technologies I use where a 10  
year archive of the user list, and is no longer publicly available.   
This is especially important for technologies that are little-used  
now, and the user list has dwindled.  People may just not have the  
knowledge of past users.  So, for me the archives of user list  
traffic has a high value.

One of the ironies for Notes developers is how difficult it is for  
them to send an email from someone other than the person under whose  
authority the code is executing when the mail is sent (be that a user  
or a developer).  Internet email is as insecure as Notes email is  
secure.

I may well find that the best solution is to use Gmail or SpamSieve  
as a front-end to my own server.

Bernard