Ted Carnahan

Up until recently, I was a customer of NetIdentity for my old email address (ted@carnahan.com). I left their service, because for $60 a year I was getting a 1G email inbox and really lousy webhosting. Contrast that with Dreamhost, which offers 20G of storage, unlimited domains, IMAP access, and a bunch of other features for a little over $100 per year. Here’s their business model:

1. buy a bunch of name-based domains (like carnahan.com)
2. sell (expensive!) email addresses and subdomains
3. profit until people wise up and get their own domains
4. send threatening-sounding emails when they cancel their accounts

Keep in mind that I was a loyal customer, for values of loyal that include being with the same email provider for 9 years. On the Internet’s timescale, that’s geologic.

It all came to an end when I got fed up paying good money for a mere subdomain lacking even PHP. So I left them. We’re seeing other people. I’m seeing a webhost that stinks less, they’re seeing the gullible people who still don’t know any better. I didn’t let things linger - I told them it was the end. But now, the relationship takes a sinister twist - they’re stalking me! I’ve received several emails entitled “Your NetIdentity account will be locked!”

Hi folks! I know that my account expired last month. I know that you’re going to turn off access to my accounts. I told you to do it. Stop sending me email acting like I just made an oversight or a mistake. We’re finished.

Now hear this:

I got news from Wartburg Theological Seminary that, provided that my last recommendation form and a stray college transcript get turned in soon, I will get my provisional acceptance to the seminary. I also found out that I will have to take Summer Greek, so I can expect to start the third week in July. Less than 4 months to go!

My website was offline for about a day. Sorry about that - Nightmarehost’s one-click installer picked the wrong database hostname (but the right database, fortunately) for my Wordpress installation, and when I deleted that hostname, it took my site down (but not my data). Either that, or I picked wrong - but I’d rather blame them.

Merl Ledford III is my new personal hero. I read a terrific letter from this attorney whose “middle-aged, conservative clients” are accused by the RIAA of downloading gangsta-rap. He’s taking the fight to them. In his words: “It is no fun becoming a litigation target as the result of your clients’ widely-discredited tactics.”

That is all.

After moving my church to Google Apps, I have decided that I like the GMail interface so much that I want to use it for my own personal email address. I want to move my copious existing email archives to Google, and that’s where the complications kick in:

First, my mail archives are in a Dreamhost IMAP account, and GMail can only retrieve POP3 mail.

Second, if I change my DNS, I may not be able to tell Google where to find my mail at all.

After pondering it for a bit, here are some informal, probably incomplete notes about what I did (in brief):

1. Download a local backup copy of the Dreamhost IMAP mail. You can never be too careful.
2. Copy all mail from all folders into your Inbox. This includes your Sent Mail, so copy that into your Inbox as well. GMail will handle the threading (mostly) correctly when it downloads your mail.
3. Change the MX records in your Dreamhost panel to point to Google. Check the box for Dreamhost to keep accepting mail for your domain.
4. Tell your GMail account to check mail for your Dreamhost account using POP3. Point it at mail.YOURDOMAIN.com, which isn’t affected by the MX record change (because you told them to keep accepting mail) and tell it not to delete mail off the server.
5. Wait for GMail to grab all of your mail. It’ll take a while. (It took about 24 hours to move 7000 messages. You can check the progress in Settings:Accounts)
6. If you copied your sent mail to your Inbox (recommended), you’ll notice a lot of conversations that only have mail from you. Just archive these in GMail and they will end up in Sent Mail where they belong.
7. After Google has retrieved all of your POP3 mail, check your Dreamhost account one last time to pick up any mail that got delivered there while the MX record was changing.
8. Log back into Dreamhost and tell them to stop accepting mail for your domain (and just use the custom MX entry).
9. Viola! Now you use GMail!

I’m pretty happy with the results - all of my mail moved over, properly threaded, easily accessible. Life is good! Of course there are some things that aren’t so good. Right now I am afflicted / bothered / annoyed by these issues:

1. The Google Apps personalized home page is not as fully featured or good looking as the one that comes with a normal Google Account. For example, you can’t add the shiny widgets (like Google Reader).
2. If you already were signed up for a Google Account with the email address you are now using with Google Apps, some things are going to break. For example, Google Calendar won’t accept invitations to use new calendars until you disambiguate which account uses that email address. You can only do that by changing the email address associated with the Google Account.
3. Nothing will get pulled across from your regular Google Account. For example, you start fresh with a new Calendar.

As of now I’ve moved my calendar and mail over, and I have a separate Google Account for using Google Reader, and it’s working pretty well for me. By the way, I’ve added a link to my Google Reader Shared Items in the sidebar on my homepage.

After experiencing load averages over 50 on two DreamHost servers, gummi and hyperion, I would like to define a new unit of measurement: the “DreamHost.”

One DreamHost is defined as a server running with a one-minute load average of 8.

Hence, my server has been running at between 6 and 7 DreamHosts today. But I’m getting off easy, this guy ran into DreamHost servers running at 125 DreamHosts!

I’m done dreaming - I’m having nightmares now.