Jason M. Hanley :: Custom Software Developer

Anyone who knows me has probably heard me go on about how good Gmail is. This will help put their spam filtering into perspective, however. Lately I’ve run into a lot of people that have trouble with either a) too much spam getting into their inbox, or b) overactive spam filters putting legitimate mail in their spam folder so they miss it.

Gmail’s spam filtering algorithm is amazing. My current spam folder is up over 2,100 messages now and growing. Gmail automatically deletes any spam older than 30 days, so that means it is filtering about 70 spams a day, compared to my 10-20 legitimate emails on my personal account. I hardly ever check my spam folder for legitimate emails, because the filtering is just that good. Over the course of a year, I’ve only had four or five “semi-legitimate” emails get mis-filtered. In all cases, they were from a company and had “spammy” advertising language in them. On the other side of things, spam messages only make it into my inbox once every couple of weeks. Out of 1,000 spam messages, less then one ever makes it to my inbox.

So my advice? If you’re drowning in spam, just get Gmail!

With blogs, mySpace, Facebook, and similar sites these days, there’s quite a bit of debate of how much personal information one should put on the Internet. Some have even suggested that anything posted to the Internet should be completely anonymous.

There’s certainly good reason to be careful. I think that some people forget that anything posted online is out there - public information, pretty much forever. Even if you take something down, odds are some cache or archiving system has already picked it up. Large corporations and individuals alike have found that out the hard way.

I have a good deal of personal information on my collection of sites, but most of it is related to my business or resume. I try not to put anything out there that could cause me grief later on.

Like most things, I think that putting personal information online is alright, as long as you do it intelligently, and think about the ramifications before you hit “upload.”

You’ve probably heard about and used different “web 2.0″ web-based applications, like Gmail, and BaseCamp. These applications all use a technology referred to as AJAX along with DHTML to provide an experience similar to desktop applications in your web browser.

This software has become extremely easy to use and is usually available at a low cost, or for free. For example, Writely and Google Spreadsheets provide most of the functionality of Microsoft Word and Excel, but are free, and allow collaboration and sharing automatically over the Internet.

There is one thing about these applications, however, that is a big problem. What happens when your Internet connection goes down? What happens when you want to update your BaseCamp project on an airplane that hasn’t been equipped with in-sky Internet?

Many big companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and the Mozilla foundation are working on this problem. Google already has made some progress with its Google Desktop software. It lets you access your Gmail, Google Calendar events and cached web content when you are not connected. Microsoft has various offline features in its operating system and software packages that sometimes work and sometimes don’t.

This is a hard problem, though. Nobody has come up with a really nice, scalable solution for offline data synchronization. When they do, however, it will open up a whole new era of web-based applications.