Technology Marches On

I'm trying to get out of lugging my laptop to work every day. I primarily bring it for email and ICQ access, which I dial out for, because of the corporate proxy/firewall. Since it's pretty obvious I only use it for personal reasons, its presence isn't exactly warmly received. Also, because we're moving to a different floor in the office, I'm going to lose my dial out line anyway, since the business reason for having it went a way a long time ago. Looks like the free ride is over.

Email access is fairly easy to solve. I was using Yahoo mail to check my POP accounts, but I hate replying via Yahoo. I want my outgoing email to look like it came from my regular email account, not Yahoo. Yahoo also sends a monthly spam for it's POP checking service. For awhile, there was a free web mail provider that allowed you to set the "From" and "Reply To" addresses, and it didn't tack on any ads. Needless to say, they just recently closed up shop. I did a little searching, and found WebBox, which is a web based email service for only $6 a year. It is ad-free, allows you to deal with up to 5 POP boxes, and allows me to send email from any machine with the nosuch.org address. I'm very happy with it.

I also solved the ICQ dilemea as well. I found ICQProxy, which will wrapper my ICQ in HTTP requests. Ideally one of the more generic HTTP tunneling solutions would be even better, since I have a computer at home which I can use as an outgoing proxy. But I have yet to find one that doesn't have installation instructions targeted at a UNIX administrator. I just want something I install on my machine at home, and my machine at work, fill in a few blanks, and go. I don't want to have to think that hard. The ICQProxy works like that, except I just have to install it on my work machine. It works great, though I have to use a less than current release of ICQ. If you see me asking you for contact list authorization, now you know why.
posted 12:36 PM | link |