The upload feature is the one that is perhaps the most unique to this service. When a new photo is uploaded to a gallery it is automatically synchronised back into iPhoto on the gallery owners Mac next time the Mac is connected to the Internet. This happens regardless of what operating system the person sending the photos to the gallery is using making this the ideal way for Mac and Windows users to collaborate on photo libraries ( well at least from the Mac perspective ).

What some new iLife ‘08 users may not realise about the .Mac service, especially those like myself who had an original account when they purchased their Macs which subsequently expired, is that you can sign up for a 60 day free trial. The trial is limited to 50Mb of disk space rather that the 10Gb that full subscribers are allocated, however for trying out the new facilities this should be more than enough.

If you haven’t yet seen the .Mac galleries you can check out mine here

Enjoy.

If you are interested to see what is going on in the background on your network then this application can make for a fun little diversion and may possibly enlighten you in the process. When you launch the app the first thing you will see is a blank window with a number of buttons along the top. Clicking on the Start Capture button will in most cases prompt you for an admin username and password ( unless of course you are already logged in as an admin in which case it will prompt for your password ). After that you will probably not see anything happen immediately. If you now go to your browser and open a web page you will see a burst of activity and the window will begin to display information about the conversation going on between your PC and the Internet. Each row of data displayed shows a communication between a source and a destination.

If you double click one of these rows another window will appear showing you detailed information about that conversation. Clicking on Payload and Raw Data will show the actual data that was transmitted, whilst the Images tab will display the actual images transmitted as part of a web page ( for parts of a conversation that involved the transmission of images ).

Where this type of utility is interesting is in demonstrating just how open many network applications are and how easily important information such as usernames and passwords can be obtained. As an example of this start a network capture session then fire up Mail. In the captured data you should see a row with your PC’s IP address as the source and a Port of 110. Double click this row and you will see the Raw Data of that conversation displayed something like the image below :-

As you can clearly see your email username and password are there for the whole world to see. Now imagine that this conversation had been recorded by someone monitoring conversations on a wireless network in a coffee bar and you can see that the skills necessary to obtain this sort of data are within reach of anyone.

Makes you think doesn’t it ?

[tags]mac, osx, network, sniffer, eavesdrop, security[/tags]

What I quickly discovered was that one of the lesser known features of GMail is its remarkable SPAM filtering capabilities. It seemed that the obvious solution was to try using GMail as an alternative to my ISP mail service and to replace Mail with MailPlane.

New email users who are not reliant on an existing mail address can easily register with GMail ( and receive a googlemail.com email address ), however I did not want to lose my old email address nor have to re-register with mailing lists and other services so the alternative solution of migrating my existing mail address to GMail was a necessity.

There are basically two options here, the first and simplest is to setup your GMail account to download emails from your existing email service. All that is required here is to add your ISP’s mail server address, your username and password to your GMail account ( Select Settings, Accounts and Get Mail from Other Accounts ) and the GMail service will regularly poll for new mail and transfer into GMail ( either leaving the original mail untouched or deleting it once transferred ).

The second more complex solution involves reconfiguring your domains DNS records to send email direct to GMail. This is only an option if you have your own registered domain ( ie you can’t do this if your email address is part of your ISP’s domain name ). In my case this was the preferred option as it cuts out one step through which mail has to pass before arriving in my inbox and removed the dependancy on my ISP’s email servers. This step will vary significantly from one ISP to another, fortunately Google provide some good guides on how what to do and most reasonably competent computer users should have no trouble getting through the relevant hoops.

DNS changes typically take a couple of days to propogate around the net. In those couple of days mail will continue to be delivered to your old ISP servers whilst at the same time some new items will be start to appear on GMail. To ensure that no mail is lost along the way it is wise to setup a mail collection as in the first option. This will ensure that any emails sent to your ISP are copied into GMail. Once the DNS changes are fully replicated and no further mail is appearing on your ISP servers you can safely remove this mail collection safe in the knowledge that all mail is being delivered direct to GMail.

Having gone through these steps a few days ago now I am now in this position and I am amazed at just how effective GMails SPAM filtering is. So far I have yet to receive a single unwanted item of email in my Inbox. This is in contrast to the situation before where in a typical day I would guess around 20-30 emails found their way through the SPAM defences into my Inbox.

This turnaround is in no small part due to my new Mail client of choice MailPlane ( which I have hardly mentioned so far ! ). I will publish a follow on article to this one to explain in more detail the features of MailPlane. In the meantime if you are finding yourself struggling to deal with junk mail and want a very capable solution I would strongly suggest looking into the combination of GMail and MailPlane. At present MailPlane are only sending out 100 invitations to download the app each day so you will need to register and wait a few weeks before you can start using the app. Also there is no published price for when the app is launched which is a shame. However as long as the price is less than about £40 I would guess that it will sell well.