The categories are; Browsing, Communications, Community, Data, Entertainment, Media, Mobile, Productivity and Commerce, Publishing, Reference.

Surely, it is a good ego boost for the people behind the services to get recognition, but does it serve any journalistic purpose? I am not so sure about that; Rafe Needleman and the Webware crew are preaching for the already saved. There is no internal ranking of the sites in the individual categories – so how do I as a visitor know which site got more votes than the other? (Yes, alright – they do have a list of the over-all top 10 and the sites that got over 1000 votes, though it doesn’t show the internal ranking in between the sites within each category. Perhaps the over-all statistic material wasn’t enough?! I don’t know…)

From my own perspective I am glad that the swizz army-knife-like site Netvibes, which deserves more media coverage – as it is a really nice service to keep track on all your communication needs ranging from rss-feeds (sites, forums, email, blogs etc), to email, to skype, to.. yeah – you get the idea.

Google was the company with most services in the top 100-list, yet this is not surprising as they are the biggest site on the Internet.

To the Webware authors; Please make the list more detailed the next time and get a broader statistic foundation (aka get more people to vote on the list), then we’re talking about a relevant list.

I don’t want to be a “I told you so”-kind of person, but if your email is truly important for you – then spend 10 euros a year on a commercial service at an email-provider of your choice.

Not only do you get independent of your broadband company, you also get to keep your email-address if you ever switch providers of your broadband.

The staff behind Yahoo! Mail made a post on their blog, which they gave the entertaining name “We’ve parked your Mail account next to the tractor“.

An interesting thing that the staff write in this blog-post is:

“But we regularly move accounts from farm to farm to balance the load on our servers. So there’s no guarantee your account will be on any specific farm for any amount of time.”

I know Yahoo! has immense traffic and a gigantic datastorage over at their end, but why not do what Google has done and only point to “mail.google.com”, or in Yahoo!’s case: “mail.yahoo.com”?! This would make such questions never pop up in their customers, aka their users’ minds.

Speaking about Yahoo! Mail; The beta of their webmail-service is a nice, yet a bit heavy on the local computer, but it does have more features making it closer to a “real” email-client than what their biggest competitor Google Mail.

Though, one of the major downsides of Yahoo! Mail is their advertisements. It takes up way too much of the usable space. I can’t wait, or at least I hope this day comes, when Yahoo! ditches their banner advertisements in their webmail-service and implements context-based text-ads.

Matt Lake really puts down the grim reality into words in his chronicle.

One of the biggest problems is the outgoing spam which we as domain-owners can’t protect ourselves against: Spoofed from-addresses.

This quote says it all:

“Somebody out there, probably thousands of people, are getting messages for V-1-A=G-R-A and c1a-L:IS and embedded GIFs touting some penny stock that nobody’s heard of–all with my domain name all over the From field.”

The above can be handled on a pure technical level, as most of the error-responses can be filtered out automatically. What is worse however is the bad-will that these spoofed send-outs creates, whether these fake emails contains the spam mentioned above or viruses.

This is how it works, told through Matt Lake’s experience:

“Essentially, spoofing would mean that a spammer ran a piece of software that got hold of my domain name, possibly from its own spam lists, maybe from sniffing around in vulnerable e-mail servers from which e-mail came to me, or maybe from the central WHOIS database. The software then generated a mess of fake addresses with my domain on the end to masquerade as the sender’s addresses in the From and/or Reply To fields of their crass bulk e-mail. Then they sent out messages to unwitting strangers.”

Matt continues:

“I picked up the bounced-back messages only because I have a catchall account at my domain host. E-mail spoofing could happen to anybody with a domain (it could have happened to you), and most people never find out about it.

Unfortunately, if this spammer manages to annoy enough people, my domain may end up on a blacklist. Fortunately, because this kind of thing happens all the time, the blacklist compilers probably won’t punish me for what that spammer did, but they may. So I need to keep an eye out for any dropped messages to important clients and friends and comb the huge public list of blacklisted sites and hope for the best.

All told, my options aren’t terribly cheering.”

What is needed is an overhaul of the email-system, however there are many competing technologies and companies promoting these technologies plus that email shouldn’t lose it’s simplictic and genious usage.

A risk that is often forgotten when talking about which way is best to develop email to be less sensitive to UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email = spam) is that less developed countries will be left behind (again) if the systems becomes too complex and / or expensive.

Another quote from Matt’s chronicle shows on another trap you as an administrator / provider can run into:

“So perhaps Verizon’s spam filter was doing exactly what it was supposed to do: removing objectionable unsolicited content from my mailbox. But of course, this does also mean that Verizon considers itself a spammer.”

Also note that there’s been a class action lawsuit against Verizon due to their spam-filtering methods. (Read about it here.)

It looks like we are stuck between a rock and a hard place…

This means that you can enter your email-address and get notified straight in your inbox when there’s a new post on this blog – nifty huh?!