“In the last few weeks I’ve upgraded my email environment here and there, and I thought it would be worth passing on hints in the areas of mail-sending service and security.
I’m sure that quite a few of my readers, who are a pretty bleeding-edge bunch, know about all this stuff and mastered it years back. Typically I’m sort of at the trailing edge of the leading wave of early adopters; so I’ll bet that there are a few folks out there for whom this will be useful.”
Tim has a nice writeup on how to get yourself set up with signed (certificated) email in OS X’s Mail.app. It almost worked for me . . .
I found that Mozilla stubbornly refused to work (neither 1.5 or 1.6 would let me back up my certificate files), but Mozilla FireBird was glad to help. Of course, changing browsers means redoing the whole process since the cert is tied to the browser until it’s installed.
<grumble> All the same, I’m glad I did it.
And he also relates his (good) experience with pay-as-you-go smtp relays: he uses MailHop, but another was advertised with the article.
I think this may be the way email is going: you pay to send mail, either piecemeal or on an account with some quota. No one will get rich from it, but it should put a dent in spam if we can rely on the relay services to maintain a secure infrastructure with reliable authentication.
[Posted with ecto]