Sittin' In The Gmail Penalty Box

I'm banned from using Gmail for 24 hours. To use a hockey analogy, I'm in the penalty box for a Major infraction! Why?

Well, a few days ago I decided to offer a new service with my computer donation program. The genesis for the idea came about last weekend when we rented a truck and delivered a dozen computers around Vancouver. The systems we're handing out these days are generally 1.5+ GHz Pentium 4's with lots & lots of freeware software loaded. Talking with some of the recipients, it became immediately obvious that most will have great difficulty figuring out the basics. The fact that all this other stuff is loaded, including a ZoneAlarm like utility isn't going to lessen their learning curve, but will likely make it worse.

While we don't have the resources (everyone's a volunteer) to provide telephone support, I thought that it would be interesting to let past recipients send in their questions to Danny. Think of it like "Dear Abby" but totally tech.

So, I exported all the e-mail addresses from our database into a spreadsheet, and proceeded to send a prepared e-mail to 50 people at a time. There were 924 in total. I don't like the webmail app our website provider offers so I decided to use Gmail, which I love, instead. With Gmail, there's an easy way to pretend you're sending e-mail from a different account that you also control. Thus, everyone would think I was actually sending it from my BCDigitalDivide.org account.

So I proceeded: 50, 100, 150 .... Some bouncebacks started occurring but I thought nothing of them because some of these addresses were 2.5 years old. Undoubtedly some would be defunct. 200, 250, 300 ... 500 ... and then KABOOM!

Gmail informed me that I had reached the 500 per day limit with that many bouncebacks occurring. Their automated system suspected I was a spammer.

So I'm now banned from using it for 24 hours. Lesson learned!

Technology Changes in My Life

Most people are familiar with the term "Spring Cleaning". It offers one an opportunity to throw out the old clutter and be open to something new. I've spent the past few days doing the same thing with assorted technology in my life. This includes:

1. Reformatting my laptop's hard drive and reinstalling Windows XP from scratch. I've actually had to do this twice because of some problems the first time. Things had gotten so bad with the state of my Windows that my software development tool, Visual Studio 2005, was no longer working properly. Rebuilding everything from scratch is a looooooong process so this time, once I have a base system that I like, I'm going to back it up with Acronis.
2. Moving my PocketPollster.com website to a new Windows server hosted by GoDaddy. The previous temporary site for PP was just pure HTML. The new one in the future will work with Microsoft's .Net technology. It's not done yet but I'm working on it! To test out the new functionality I built a simple .Net webpage to more quickly bring up the CKNW Audio Archive, something I access a lot. You can reach it here. It doesn't look fancy but there's actually a lot of coding under the hood to determine the correct hourly segment that needs to be accessed. In order for this page to work, you need to enable pop-ups. This is what you'll see - very simple, but also very effective:
   

The final thing I'm doing is forwarding all of my PocketPollster e-mail to my Gmail account. It's a new way [for me] of having all of my e-mail online but a transition I want to make.