I don’t get a lot of spam since I switched to gmail but…

Reese, Ian ? [email protected]
13:30 (21 hours ago)

to undisclosed recipients
Attn:

Ms. Rubiah Bashir, wishes to entrust her entire estate to you to set up a Charitable Foundation in honor of her late Husand (Late Dr. Abu Saud Bashir). Please contact her through her personal email address: [email protected]

Apple Mail grrr

According to Apple – Use only this server
Indicate whether to use only the specified outgoing mail server to send messages, or use any available server. When the checkbox is not selected, Mail tries to find another available server to send messages if your specified, trusted server is unavailable.

Sadly this is not the case…

I have this box checked and still Apple Mail sends my mail from my gmail account instead of my work Exchange account – what gives?

Google Contacts Nightmare

So a slight problem recently with contacts.
I use a number of tools and web apps in my daily life to keep things organised beacuse I work for myself I use a number of machines in a number of offices so it’s easier to rely on web applications for some tasks.

30 boxes (30boxes.com) for a calendar as this also allows my partner to add events and we can keep track of what nights we have free for stuff which is nice.
Gmail (gmail.com) for email as it’s usually reliable and has heaps of storage space and I like the search
plaxo (plaxo.com) for keeping my contacts up to date
linkedin (linkedin.com) for business contacts
mobile me (me.com) because it came free with my iPhone and works with my MacBook address book

The problem I have now is syncing al the data.

This used to be easy as every now and then I would sync with plaxo to my work machines and that would pick up new contacts and I would dump them into Gmail manually. Not too painful and simple.

Now though the iPhone sync has got the better of me. Gmail has a whacked-out idea of contacts management in that email addresses are automatically added to your contacts list each time you use the reply, reply to all, or forward functions to send messages to addresses not previously stored in your contacts list. Sounds great in theory. In practise I don’t actually know a lot of those people and I may not want them in my contacts list.

iPhone has imported contacts from Gmail bringing all this random data and that has synched with mobile me and now my phone has 1800+ contacts only around 300 of which I actually added myself.

Google what are you thinking adding all these people to my contacts list without asking me?
Apple what are you doing allowing me to sync with data that is so different from my original set without setting off alarm bells somewhere.

Gah!