> Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device

To get rid of this tagline on your outgoing Blackberry emails, log into your Blackberry provider’s website (from a computer, not your phone, because they hide this setting when you log in from your phone in order to make it hard to
change)…

  Sprint: http://sprint.blackberry.com/
  Verizon: http://www.blackberry.com/go/vzw/
  or just google for "blackberry yourcarrier"

…click on Edit to edit your email account settings …then just delete your signature.

Also, something that I find handy is setting the following address as my "Auto BCC" address: myaccount+sent-blackberry@webmail.us   This stores a copy of all the mail I send from my Blackberry into a folder in my webmail account called "sent-blackberry".  You can do this with any folder, as long as the folder is all lowercase and contains no special characters such as spaces.

I have two new email habits to report…

Blackberry Sync

So as of last week, I no longer add myself as an invitee on every meeting I add to my webmail calendar in order to get the event to show up on my Blackberry.  Now I use our Blackberry Sync product to keep my Contacts, Calendar and Tasks in sync with the data in my webmail account.  It’s in private beta right now and still has a few kinks to work out, but I already love it.

Filtering after delivery

I got sick of having to read mail twice because my Blackberry doesn’t mark things as read in my webmail account.  This was happening because of the funky multi-mailbox forwarding system I set up to simulate folders on my Blackberry.  Blackberry would check these secondary accounts and mark mail as read in there, but it wouldn’t mark it as read in my primary account.  Over the weekend I ditched those secondary accounts and I deleted all of my filtering rules in webmail.  Now everything comes to my primary inbox and I have Blackberry checking just that account.  When I read something on my Blackberry now it marks it as read in webmail.

But I still love folders.  So to manage my 100+ folders I installed imapfilter on my desktop.  I transfered all of my webmail filter rules into this and I also configured it to not move any mail from my inbox which is flagged or unread.  Throughout the day now, after I’ve caught up with everything in my inbox, I simply press a button in my quicklaunch bar and woosh… all my mail gets filed away into folders.

I expect these two changes to save me at least 20 minutes per
day.  And it will save me even more time when I’m traveling and using my Blackberry as my
primary email client.

Amazon now has bad-ass EC2 virtual servers.  I am curious how powerful these new options really are though.  We use Amazon’s single core $0.10/hr EC2 instances within our data backups system to do localized processing on the backup data store.  They work fine for this purpose.  However, we have tried in the past to run a CPU intense app on EC2, but that brought our EC2 instances to their knees compared to "equivalent" real servers.

For example, we toyed with the idea of building a spam filtering overflow system on EC2 to dynamically add capacity to our spam filtering cluster here at Rackspace as a precautionary measure if our customers’ inbound mail volume were to ever spike beyond what our real servers could handle.  We actually got as far as coding the complete system for scaling-out the appropriate number of EC2 virtual spam filtering servers, rerouting sub-sets of our mail stream, and scaling-in after the traffic spike ended.  However we never could get this system to perform the way we needed it to.  The EC2 instances could not process near the amount of mail needed to make this cost efficient. With the CPU pegged it took 4 EC2 virtual servers to equal the spam processing power of one real single CPU Athlon 3200+ server with 1 GB RAM.

So we shelved this project and just added a ton of dual-opteron boxes in order to be able to sustain large traffic spikes.

Amazon says that their $0.10/hr EC2 instances are equivalent to an "early-2006 1.7 GHz Xeon processor", but for our app one of these EC2 instances was equivalent to 1/4 of a 2005 Athlon processor.  So their 4-core instance should now just about equal a single-cpu Athlon box from our perspective.  But at $0.40/hr the cost is the same as before.

Disclaimer: We did not spend a lot of time fine tuning our EC2 image, so perhaps we could have seen better performance if we did.  However, we built our image by starting with their standard Red Hat base image, which is what the majority of EC2 customers run.

I use webmail and Blackberry as my primary email clients.  And I am a heavy user of the webmail shared calendaring system.  The webmail calendar does not yet sync to Blackberry devices, so here is how I "sync"…

A feature of Blackberry is that it will automatically add all meeting invitations that are received via IMAP to your Blackberry calendar.  So all invitations that I receive from other people already automatically appear on my Blackberry calendar.  In order to add my own events to both calendars, all I do is add it via webmail and invite myself to the event… it then automatically shows up on my Blackberry calendar.

Prediction: meeting invite spam