Ted lays it out.

(And now, a cathartic "I hate this company and I am never patronizing them again, please don't either" post. I should have done ones for at least Speakeasy/Covad and IBM's server division last year. Ah well.)

I went to go register a new domain yesterday (announcement soon! Probably this weekend). I've been using Joker for a while, IIRC on the principle that the cooks were using it so it must be decent enough. While registering, I had a bunch of problems with the horrid, useless "Verified by Visa" popup [1] that you see everywhere these days, and eventually this must have looked like suspicious activity to the bank so my card was declined.

I only actually found this out when I got mail saying my order was canceled. Okay, sure. I wrote back and explained what I thought was going on and that I'd like to resolve it. Another half hour later, I got this response:

Hello,

please use
   https://joker.com/goto/support/
for all support inquiries.

Regards, your Joker.com team

This is complete and utter bullshit [2]. If a company is going to mail me, I expect to be able to mail them. I have a mail client; it manages communication the way I want it to, and runs my preferred editor to compose messages (which is, in fact, how I am writing this very blog post). I am sick of dicking around on JavaScript-requiring web forms that all work differently and typing in postage-stamp-sized little textareas. Anything I do type in them is lost, because unlike my email client, web forms don't save sent messages unless the authors feel like letting you have a Cc:. When a company forces me to do this, I take it as a sign of disrespect. I tolerate a web browser [3] for reading pages; "applications" are universally painful [4].

One of the things I used to like about Joker was the PGP mail interface. AFAIK, they have not killed it (I didn't bother to check), but with automatic "we don't want to listen to you unless you inconvenience yourself" bounces like this, what's the point? I surmise that there is, or was, some smart person there who understood how (and more to the point, why) to hook a pseudo-mailbox up to a software system, and that they have been overridden by someone in management who realized it's much easier to have dime-a-dozen webmonkeys hook a form up to the same system since 90% of users just don't care (and even people who do notice and dislike this, but are not as inflamed as I, have come to expect it because everyone else refuses mail, so, y'know, pick yr battles son, etc.). Not the sort of culture I put faith my in.

The irony of it all was that I was registering this domain to run a service I had decided to create specifically because of another site refusing mail and directing me to an even lamer web form. That would take incoming mail and, you know... process it with software.

Suffice it to say, I am no longer going to be their customer. In deciding who to use instead, I figured I'd do a survey of where the domains in that "Subscription" column [5] on Planet Debian were registered, but... WHOIS is basically useless. Every server just returns free text, formatted differently by (apparently) every implementation under the sun. Cheaply parsing something out from .com/.org/.net is possible, but InterNIC kindly blacklists your IP after making more than a few requests in a few minutes. I guess I'm just gonna go with Gandi (but other suggestions would be welcome).

In somewhat unrelated developments, I went to nic.at to update my nameservers for Where the Bus At? last week. There was no authentication or anything on the request form, so I just filled it in and sent it off. I got some automatic mail saying I need to print out a PDF, sign it, and fax it internationally. Annoying, and hardly as secure as mailing them with PGP, but whatever. But then, also yesterday, I got another mail saying the update was complete (lo and behold, it was). I am now somewhat concerned about the security of my domain: it seems like anyone can come by and put something in the form and if I'm not around to notice the courtesy mail and ask that they stop the request, it'll eventually go through, no questions asked. I have not yet written them to figure out what the deal is, though. Kinda burned out.

I guess I didn't really have high hopes for dealing directly with a ccTLD registrar (this was the first time I've done it... I can't believe I blew €60 on a cutesy domain name) rather than a reseller who competes in a market, but then, I go and google "domain registrar" and look at all the AdWords dollars spent trying to compete with GoDaddy [6] and just kind of want to put my head in my hands. On DJB's DNS pages there's this bit about setting up a domain. It doesn't say "How to (buy|register|whatever) a domain name". It says, "How to receive a delegation from .com". Which is of course, how it works. And what I want to buy. I don't want "parking" or even gratis nameservers. Just a delegation from .com. Please.

No AdWords came up when I googled for that phrase to copy the link. Sometimes I guess markets just sink to the bottom.

Anyway. I feel like there's a free-software angle here. My continuing irrational hatred of using other people's forms, web-based mailing-list substitutes, nameservers, etc. stems not so much from their suckage but from the fact that there is no longer any software there, in front of me, for the four freedoms to possibly apply to. Being able to run your mail reader for any purpose doesn't win you much if no one uses mail. I don't really know what to do about this.

After some weeks of final testing, I've just uploaded packages for sup-mail to NEW. I'm pretty excited about this.

Sup is a console-based MUA, like mutt (which I have used for many years). A few things distinguish it from most mail readers targeted at geeks like us:

• Sup has no folders, a la Gmail. After watching many friends and even fellow hackers switch to Gmail, I have to admit: this literal hierarchical organization thing doesn't scale. I was planning to totally redo my mail folder system Any Day Now for about six months prior to starting on this. It was never going to happen.
• Sup uses a Ferret full-text index to make this approach plausible. Search is super fast and beats (for me) both any kind of "organization" I could have disciplined myself into and the fine-grained control of something like mutt's search. It's sort of like git: until you do it, you don't realize how much more productive you can be when previously-expensive operations become instantaneous.
• Sup works with threads, not messages; this is another thing Gmail got right. I used to waste brain cells thinking about which messages in a thread were worthwhile enough to save or not. Given the absurdly cheap price of disk relative to what we can type out in plain text since, like, a decade ago, this is crazy. In the index, I only have to look at whether a thread has new chatter or not, not its size, shape, or where the new messages are relative to it. All that's in the thread-view buffer where I actually read content.
• Sup is written in Ruby. Back in the dawn of time, I used Gnus, and while I wasn't very good at elisp, the hackability afforded by being written in a high-level language was very nice compared to programs mostly implemented in C (even if they had a tacked-on scripting language). Plus, I love Ruby right now.

Despite all of those wins, sup currently has many drawbacks, and I don't recommend it for everyone. (And I mean everyone who thinks that the above are good ideas and are interested in using it; plenty of people, I'm sure, already think everything about this is idiotic, not new, or inferior to their preferred MUA. That's fine! You can ignore it all.) Here's what's still problematic:

• At version 0.6, sup is very much not-yet-1.0. While it handles insanely large amounts of email without breaking a sweat, I still keep an additional backup of everything. (If Ferret crashes, the original copies of mail will be untouched, but it never hurts to be paranoid.)
• The flow of data from your physical mail store to the sup index is currently one-way only. Actually removing deleted/spam messages is a big hack (if it works at all), and labels/flags/etc live entirely in Ferret-land. If you want to manipulate an actual mailbox, mutt is still the tool for the job (and then, you need to re-sync sup). This is probably the deal-breaker for most of us. I jumped in anyway because I feel like it can be solved (or more likely, made irrelevant) later.
• William (upstream) is currently re-designing the whole thing from scratch, replacing the index library with Sphinx, and decoupling the index from the console frontend. As a result, the previous item is pretty much a non-priority (and bugs in general are not going to get the same amount of love as usual). I am hoping that we end up dumping mail into the index directly, then writing more frontends to write to Maildir backup, serve as webmail/whatever, but this is a long way off. On the plus side, thanks to Thrift, they will not be limited to Ruby.
• Ruby's ncurses library still doesn't handle Unicode correctly. It can be patched (still doesn't work totally right), but I'm trying to find a more permanent solution for Debian.

So, if you're interested enough that you want to deal with these warts for now, apt-get install sup-mail (as soon as it hits the archive) and join us! Hopefully being in Debian will increase the userbase and get things fixed faster. If you're unsure, stay tuned for the next-generation version later.

(There are screenshots and a few introductory docs over at Rubyforge that illustrate and explain all this in more depth, which I recommend checking out if you're still saying, "...huh." Me, I'm a sucker for any piece of software with a manifesto.)

So today I recieved another batch of backscatter spam (it comes in waves; my email address will forever be on these lists). Normally there are several rejections from mailing lists where only subscribers can post, etc. But this time:

The following lines in your email message did not appear to be
Lyris ListManager commands and were skipped:

> unsubscribe confirm
>  -> You did not specify a valid mailing list name to unsubscribe from.

Disturbing. Now they're trying to take me off legit mailing lists! Perhaps they think I won't notice and it'll reduce the amount of ham I have for my Bayesian filter. Little do they know I'm still subscribed to -devel :-)

Apparently I just spent 10 minutes tweaking my de-crapify content-filter for a mailing list which no longer exists.

Also, The Hafler Trio! Exclamation point, one.

I just wrote, in a mail to mb-users, “that would have been the correct place for the OP to not post this.” I think I need to start using this phrase more often. Particularly when someone acts surprised that the world is not their personal help forum, but in fact contains other people who might want to address, well, each other.

We’re still losing the culture wars.

What happened to being a nice loser? I’m not sure. I think it’s because someone mailed me (rather persistently) asking for a non-free font. Hint: this is a faux pas.