From: sabrina downard Date: 04:40 on 04 Feb 2005 Subject: Mirapoint. Mirapoint. Oh, Mirapoint. I've been cut over to you for beta testing for about an hour now (well, when I started writing this Hate, it was) and-- well. Let's just say I'm not enjoying myself. I'm sure you do well enough for most people, but I actually, you know, sort of know what I'm doing? So, clearly, I'm just fucked. I had a really good time, attempting to replicate my masses of procmail recipes into your little filters so that my inbox isn't a firey pile of burning wreckage with spam complaints and lists and hates and my actual spam and support email and everything else strewn hither and thither. Editing several dozen filters via a webmail interface -- oh, boy! Yeah, THAT was fun. The sort of fun that makes me stare longingly at the office fridge, because I *know* there are two bottles of cold, refreshing, delicious vodka in that freezer. And there's a coffee mug right next to my hand. And exactly how fucking hard is it to put in an option to filter on an arbitrary header? I don't even want to hear "oh, you can open an RFE for new features." What the fuck is that shit? I refuse to believe that after, like, four or five years or whatever of product development on a fucking mail server appliance, I am the first person who ever wanted to filter on a header that wasn't To/Cc, From, Subject, Return-Path, or the message body. I especially love how, since it's a black box instead of a proper computer -- and this may well be the only time you hear me screaming, wanting *another* computer -- i have to give up the perl scripts that I'd written to further simplify some of my mail (I LOVE being on the AOL spam complaint address for our site!). No computer, no perl, no inline editing (and possibly auto-deleting) of email! ARRRGH! The black box will make my life easier! It is, after all, as the trainer told us, the Perfect Messaging Solution! The appliance model means I never have to worry again! APPARENTLY BECAUSE I WON'T BE ABLE TO READ MY FUCKING EMAIL! I am so, so full of hate that I'm not sure I can rant any more without my head exploding. But let's not let that stop me; if my head explodes, at least I'll be free. There was a walk-in trouble call I handled -- "handled" -- yesterday afternoon, wherein our chief network engineer, also on the new system, marked a bunch of messages in his IMAP mailbox read and had Thunderbird freeze up on him for twenty minutes, and I couldn't help him one *bit* because I'm not *able* to look under the hood! Point and drool, baby. Give me a fucking banana. Maybe his client is confused; maybe either the server or the client dropped the connection; maybe the server actually is taking 20 minutes to mark 20 messages read; I'll never know! This is the brave new world that I have to look forward to! Fuck functionality; that was just embarassing. "No, I'm sorry, I actually *can't* tell my ass from a hole in the wall. Wait ten minutes, and if that doesn't work, try killing and restarting your client, maybe it'll magically work then. Ook, ook!" Yeah. I enjoyed that. A lot. Or then there was the other network engineer who approached me this morning asking if there was anything special he had to do to get his procmail recipes working on the new system. I smiled, but I think he caught on to the creeping edge of hysteria in my voice after I began describing the webmail-gui filter process, because he left pretty quickly. Upper-level management walked past me in the hall about an hour ago and asked me how I liked my new toy. I, my friends, possess more control than a thousand dominatrices spend a lifetime dreaming of. Hate. Oh, the hate. --sabrina
From: Aaron J. Grier Date: 06:11 on 04 Feb 2005 Subject: Re: Mirapoint. On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 08:40:23PM -0800, sabrina downard wrote: > Mirapoint. worst case, couldn't you suck all your mail off of the blasted thing via IMAP or POP and filter locally?
From: mjinks Date: 09:26 on 04 Feb 2005 Subject: Re: Mirapoint. On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 10:11:47PM -0800, Aaron J. Grier wrote: > > worst case, always comforting to hear the mother tongue... > couldn't you suck all your mail off of the blasted thing via > IMAP or POP and filter locally? oh sure, but we (for Sabrina and i are by the same scourge afflicted) now find our team's name attached against our better judgment and in spite of our both open and passive-aggressive protests to this Upgrade of a mail system which serves rather a large body of customers, which Upgrade, oddly enough, was putatively not intended to produce the presently-beginning defection from the One True Centralized Mail System by all those posessed of the requisite clue to run mail servers on their own desktops or to garner unixish services from the random d00d running the LiGnUx box down the hall. our own mail's fine. so's our friends'. our professional reputations and our sanity, on the other hand, are at the mercy of the imperative to cater to the comfort of the 95% while the 5% can bloody well cease and desist all that petty hollering about open whoozits and flexible best practimawhatever. i guess i've digressed from hatesing the sofware (though i do, oh i do) to hatesing some of the reasons why software is made hatesable. sorry about that. so to bring things back around: Solaris, Mozilla, the firmware on my home machine's SCSI controller, EMACS, and Mailman can all just lick me. thanks, -jinks ps: fuck cyclades.
From: Robert G. Werner Date: 06:25 on 04 Feb 2005 Subject: Re: Mirapoint. sabrina downard wrote: > Mirapoint. [snip] > I, my friends, possess more control than a thousand dominatrices spend > a lifetime dreaming of. > > Hate. > > Oh, the hate. > > --sabrina > Isn't it just an x86 box with some f'd up proprietary os on it? Couldn't you blow that away, put linux, postfix, squirelmail, spamassasin, clamav, and courier and no one would be the wiser. It'd still look like it was the appliance but you would really have a usable solution. Made me smile, anyway.
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