OT Advice

Ian Jackson snipped-for-privacy@g3ohx.co.uk> wrote in news:oS4HEeBKMf$ snipped-for-privacy@brattleho.plus.com:

I normally use tinyurl with the preview option so that users get to see the final destination and know it is safe before continuing eg.:

but this time the f'ckrs added an affiliate link to the namesco one so I binned it.

Looking at shorturl.at they don't appear to offer a safe preview option. Does anyone know of aonother shortlink provider that does?

Demon was a bit different in that they gave you software to use (Turnpike) which was itself an SMTP server, not just a POP3 client as everyone else used. When you made the connection to their network, their SMTP server was given a nudge to send what it had collected to your Turnpike.

I don't think any other ISP used that kind of system. It took a few years for Demon to set up POP3 access, as I recall.

Try pasting into carets:

You can almost do the same with POP3. You just have to be careful to make sure that only one of your devices which you use to login to your POP3 account, is configured to delete the mails from the server. The other should all be set to never delete from server. That's how I run my email and it's good enough for me.

It's also the reason why I decided I couldn't be arsed to implement either IMAP or OAUTH2 in my email client. And no user of it has complained so far. In any case - my email client, my rules.

Bottom line is.. can I transfer my mail/domain to another provider?

Web mail is useful for holidays away from the desktop. That as well would be a bonus:-)

Yup indeed... I remember setting up my Amiga 2000 with both SMTP client and server for email on Demon - that was early to mid 90s.

Never really used turnpike since I was not using a PC for internet access at the time.

There very few other ISPs at the time, so it is hard to make any comparison.

Yup I remember them introducing it - I did not pay much attention until using Win95 on the internet - so probably 96-96 kind of time frame.

With care and effort shared POP3 can "kind of" work. It is quite a limiting experience though since POP3 has no concept of folders in the mailbox. So organising larger mailboxes is difficult - especially as there is no easy way to share that organisation. e.g. if you create a folder on one device and move a message to it, the same message will not be moved on any other device. Same goes for deleted messages. Sent messages will only appear on the device that sent them.

Indeed. While I routinely setup IMAP access for clients, I use POP3 for many of my own mailboxes because it suits my needs well enough.

Yup. The slight caveat is that your .uk.com domain can be hosted by a much smaller set of registrars than are available for other more common domain types. So your domain hosting costs will go down a bit, but nothing like as much as if you were using a straight .co.uk, .com, .net address etc.

You mailbox costs however could be significantly lower, and you would do away with the need for paying extra to send mail.

Yup it can be a handy use case... (although having mail on your phone also solves that problem. That is also the time that using IMAP makes more sense)

When I signed up with Zen for FTTP two years ago the account included email and webspace. I have used neither but I still have them. This is what it said when I tried to create a subdomain just now:

This page is used to create and manage your sub-domain of "myzen.co.uk" To create a new sub-domain you must first check that your choice is available and valid. Once your sub-domain has been checked you have the option of adding or cancelling the sub-domain name. Upon successful creation of a sub-domain you can then create up to ten Email accounts with individual usernames and passwords. Your Email and Web space should be fully operational after four hours.

They tell you how to FTP into the webspace as well

That does not necessarily follow...

If you want to keep the domain, then you could stay with nameco, or you could move it to one of the small number of others that will host it. You will save some money if you move it, just not as much as you would with a different domain. However, given that is what you have, and that is what you need to keep, then so be it.

Mail hosting is nothing to do with the domain, even if you currently buy it from the same supplier.

Paying over the odds for a small mailbox is bad enough, but paying for access to SMTP is a nonsense really, since any other mail provider would include that as standard and "expected".

So you could move your mailbox(es) to another provider easily if you wanted. (I am happy to assist if you want)[1]

Charging "per mailbox" is not uncommon - however the price can vary quite a bit. With decent forwarding / alias facilities you may fond you only need one...

So you could create a mailbox called snipped-for-privacy@yourdomain.uk.com, and then create aliases for it called (say) snipped-for-privacy@yourdomain.uk.com, and snipped-for-privacy@yourdomain.uk.com

To the outside world that would look like 2 separate mail addresses - however messages sent to them, would both be delivered to the "private" mymailbox address.

With forwarding you might find you don't need any! So creating a forward for snipped-for-privacy@mydomain.uk.com to send mail to a free gmail address would send your email to a gmail box. If you tell gmail that you want it to let you send using your domain email address, then you can do that as well (having proved you are the "owner" of the address in question). So the outside world would be none the wiser.

Well they would have to - they could hardly sell you a mailbox that can't actually send mail at all!

(most providers will bundle their own webmail as standard. However have POP/IMAP and SMTP access, then you also have a large choice of other webmail facilities that will work with it)

So changing to another mail provider just means setting up email on the new provider. When that is done, you change the MX records to point at the new provider.

Indeed, that is the kind of service that you got with many ISPs. However in the drive to ever lowering costs, it is now only a few of the more premium ISPs that bundle this kind of stuff. (and many no longer include even basic things like email)

This is all true, but my main mail repository is in any case at home. If I go somewhere else I take a stick with a version of my client built for the machine I'll be using there (I build for macOS (intel and ARM), Windows (intel) and Linux (intel and ARM)). I also take the entire set of settings and mail folders. While I'm away, all I really need is to download and read the mail, as that copy of the mail hierarchy will eventually go in the Bin anyway. Back home, it takes a few minutes to download all the mail again and filters take care of dispersing the mail.

If you paste any short URL into virustotal.com, it will follow the link (or possibly chain of links) to the final destination, and not only give you a report of what is is, but also show any possibly malicious bits along the way.

So for example following that link above shows the final destination as:

Final URL

and for added jollies gives one malicious report:

"CRDF Malicious"

"URLhaus lOCs for 2023-05-22 - according to source ArcSight Threat Intelligence -10 months ago h* Malware payload delivery host"

(although that probably just indicates that someone used has shorturl in the past to point at a malicious site - which is not unexpected)

And as long as I switch off my main pop3 clientt BEFORE I go into hospital it works...

Do you own the domain? If you do the answer is yes

Yes there are plenty of ways that can work - much depends on your circumstances, the platforms you use and the software you run.

(I must admit to never feeling the need to write my own mail client, although I have had need to write my own mail server in the past)

I don't for example have my main business email on my phone, but can use filters on my main platform to selectively forward messages that I don't want to miss to it. (or use my desktop to copy stuff I might need from my pop accounts to the imap shared with the phone if required etc)

Eudora stopped being developed and no one seemed to have anything to touch it (IMO). Then I wondered if a combination of a browser window, javascript, AJAX, apache, and PHP could be used to present a credible email client interface to an unsuspecting user. Eventually I got fed up enough with the browser makers fiddling with what a browser was allowed to do that I rewrote the whole thing in Xojo as a proper desktop application. The two versions look remarkably alike, so I was quite pleased with that.

You don't own .uk.com domains in the same way as other .uk domains

A uk.com domain is not a uk domain. It's a .com domain.