Random Sunday Bits. iTunes Movies, Email Nirvana

by Scott Jangro on 02 March 2008

I take a break from battling it out with my fellow affiliate marketers over bullies and boogeymen to bring you a few random thoughts that have been kicking around in my head for the past few weeks.

First up, iTunes movie rentals.
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Brilliant idea. Worst possible execution. ever.

I rented 300 the day that the service launched. I had 30 days to watch it. But once I started watching it, I had 24 hours to finish it. 24 hours. I couldn’t bring myself to start it up. What if I can’t finish it right now? What if I fall asleep? this same time tomorrow it will be gone! TOTAL PARALYSIS. I ended up watching it on the morning of day 30, which I think was a Wednesday morning in the background while I worked. Now there’s a good way to watch one of the best action movies of all time.

The day before I flew out to affiliate summit I rented Michael Clayton to watch on my iPhone. I got caught up in some other stuff and didn’t start watching it until late in the flight. I had to turn it off for landing with 20 minutes left. Next day the little pop up on my phone, Michael Clayton has expired.

C’mon apple, 24 hours? I’ll never ever rent another movie from iTunes until it’s at least 48, better yet 72 hours. But why not a week or two, or 30 days? I just don’t understand the risk. Am I going to walk the earth with my iPhone for 30 days and show the movie to everybody I know?

I’ll just have to rent it on Netflix, a real rental service, to see the end. Damn Apple. I hate when they make me feel bad. (Steve Jobs, you owe me two HD movies.)

Second, on a more positive note, I’ve reached email nirvana.logo1.gif

I’ve grown completely and utterly exhausted and annoyed from all the spam. I’ve tried everything, but I just have too many email accounts and they all get spammed out.

I finally forwarded just about all my email addresses to Gmail. Sure I got to live with the reality that Google now has all my emails, but whatever. I’m over that. And I’ve got to live with the fact that unless I put in a little extra effort, I reply to messages with my gmail address instead of my own domains. I’m over that too.

I’m over it because I’m in a nearly spam-free bliss. Google catches over 1000 spams for me every single day. I can hit refresh on my gmail account and watch the spam folder count increase. Once in a while one sneaks through and I congratulate it with a ‘report spam’ action.

It’s also a pretty cool thing to have all my email in one account now, instead of 10. It’s also cool to have access to all that anywhere and everywhere, including a nice IMAP integration with my iPhone.

Were you expecting something a little more interesting than Gmail? Yeah, I was too. Damn Google. I hate when they make me feel good.

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  • I switched to Gmail a year ago, intending to switch back at some point. I quickly fell in love with it. I love the conversation view. I love the accuracy of the spam filter. I love the search features. I love labels.

    I have a few complaints, but they're all minor and I can live with them.

    I still have some server-side spam filtering that catches the majority of the spam I receive, but Google catches the other several hundred a day, misses a few a day (which I diligently report), and incorrectly identifies a few legitimate emails a week as spam.
  • Scott
    Thanks Dave, great to meet you too.

    I'll check out the spamcop.net stuff again. It's been a very long time since I've looked at that.
  • Hi Scott,

    Great meeting you at the Shareasale party in Vegas. Great party that was!

    I've been using gmail for filtering for a long time now. But one step that I do before I send my mail over to gmail is 'pre-wash' the mail at spamcop.net using their DNS blacklists. This gets rid of the most obvious spam so google (and I) have less to sort through later. Kind of a two step process.

    It's been working pretty well for me. Also, then at gmail I then forward on the washed mail on to my blackberry too, in addition to downloading to my main PC via POP3.

    I agree, that gmail does a great job of filtering mail. Hey... if google can't figure out what spam is, i don't know who can do a better job?

    But I really wish that google added a few more advance features to their gmail mail, like white lists and also perhaps two levels of spam folders, so then I wouldn't have to pre-wash to get rid of the obvious spams.

    perhaps so day. But until then, I think their service is the best by far.

    Dave
  • Using Gmail as a "super" email account is great. I've been using it for anti-spam for a while and couldn't be happier. I used to safeguard my email addresses with my life for fear of spam, but I found the spam protection to be so good that nowadays I don't think twice.

    One habit I have gotten into is backing up my entire gmail account via POP occasionally w/ Apple's Mail program. I don't touch it but it does give me piece of mind if anything should ever happen to my gmail account.
  • I've gone the all Gmail route, also. It's wonderful! With IMAP, I can read and answer email when I'm away from an internet connection (provided I sync first). And I did the extra work to be able to send emails using any "from" address I want.

    A word of caution... there have been several reports of people that lost their ability to login to their accounts or just plain lost their whole account.... 1000s of emails and all. As a precaution, I created a second gmail account as a backup and I automatically send a copy of every email received to that backup account. I also use that same backup account for my Google Docs. I simply enable sharing on each document by sending an invite to my backup account.
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