Something cool about E-mail addresses

Apparently it is possible to enhance ones E-mail address with a comment. It is part of the definition of the address but is not universally implemented.

The method is to add a "+" sign after the name part of the address then the comment. For example president+you.are.such.a.goof@whitehouse.gov.

While useless on the face of it, there are potential useful things which may be done.

One thing which was suggested was when registering for things, include the name of the place when they ask for an address. This way the user knows who is selling their address to spammers.

The second thing was the potential to filter messages. For example the user could whitelist a series of codes sent as part of their E-mail addresses. When someones remote computer gets compromised the owner of the remote computer can be notified immediately and the code disabled/filtered as spam.

I've tried this with four servers and had a 50% success rate. It works with GMail and Shaw, but not Call-A.P.P.L.E. and Autobahn.

First impressions of Ubuntu (Dapper Drake)

Over all this is quite an improvement over the previous version (Breezy Badger). The install was very fast. The base packages are on the CD. Other packages are downloaded from the net and installed in a fairly short time.

Once I got my head around the way things are done it was an easy transition from Fedora 5. The root account is disabled unless the user reboots into recovery mode. Any commands which need to be executed as root are done with the sudo command. FYI, it is the user password which needs to be supplied. Updates and new software installations are done through the GUI.

The only thing is I have a problem with not going through the text prompt first. There are problems with the GUI if the user or "/" hard drive is sitting at 100% usage.

Apart from that everything works. I even installed KDE and got it running. Since I was able to eliminate much of the programs I did not want (or at least found out why they needed to be there) compared with Fedora 5, the system operates much faster. In the end I installed a few additional bells and whistles so it operates at the speed of Fedora 2.

Overall I am satisfied (for the moment) with the change.