This morning I got a polite but firm email from my web host.

Hawk Wings, it said, needs optimisation:

Your site attracts a lot of visitors which translates to a lot of hits and bandwidth (we’re talking about 100K hits yesterday, and 18 GB of bandwidth used in April). To compare: … In the past four days, your site has spawned almost *two times more* PHP processes than the next nine users combined, on the server. Also, your site used *four times more* time spent in running MySQL queries than then the next nine users combined.

Obviously that’s a nice problem for me to have, but not so nice for the other sites on the shared server.

I teach Ancient Greek in my day job, a skill of limited use when it comes to blog optimisation.

Luckily, Hawk Wings reader and professional web site designer Brady J Frey knew exactly what to do. He whipped through the code and without making too many rude remarks, cleaned it up and made it much more efficient.

It feels faster and leaner to me. I hope it will to TextDrive too. If not, things like the Recent Posts list and the tag cloud will start disappearing off the front page.

Personally, I can’t thank or recommend Brady highly enough. He was fantastic. The professional services that his design company dotfive offers are sure to be even better.hawk wings, textdrive, hosting, mail.app, apple mail, bandwidth, optimization, dotfive, big props to Brady Frey

CyberNet Technology News has posted a neat little trick that will fool Yahoo! into offering you access to its Mail beta.

All you need to do is change your content country to the UK, France or Germany (Member Information > General Preferences > Preferred Content).

Change it back and you get an invitation to join the trial of Yahoo’s new flash interface.

Needless to say, Safari is not supported.hacks, yahoo mail beta, email

Mail Forward is a “webmail translator” that allows you to use Mail.app to read your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo webmail. It can also forward email from standard POP accounts.

It works by accessing your web mail or POP mailbox and forwarding each piece of mail through your SMTP mail server. You can manage up to 20 different accounts this way.

Mail checks can be scheduled and AppleScript support offers further options for tweaking the forwarding.

A new beta released today contains modifications to work with Hotmail service changes. It will also display a warning message if an SMTP server name that is known to be unsuitable for forwarding mail is entered in the Preferences dialog.

SMTP servers that send a multiline connection greeting are now supported.

MacFreePOPs does the same thing. It is free but harder to set up.

Mail Forward comes as a demo that will work for 30 days, after which registration will cost USD 19.95. You can get it from the developer’s web site .webmail, AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo, mail.app, apple mail, plugins

Readers of Hawk Wings will know that I have an interest in philosophy and culture of the Internet, in the impact of email and the web on our conceptions of the world and ourselves, and all the other things that get posted here in the “email in general” category.

The Internet: A Philosophical Inquiry by Gordon Graham, Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, is a favourite.

So, I was excited to see a course in the newly-launched Berkeley at iTunes U on the “Foundations of American Cyberculture”.

Then I read the course description:

This new course will enable students to think critically about, and engage in practical experiments in, the complex interactions between new media and perceptions and performances of embodiment, agency, citizenship, collective action, individual identity, time and spatiality. We will pay particular attention to the categories of personhood that make up the UC Berkeley American Cultures rubric (race and ethnicity), as well as to gender, nation, and disability. The argument threading through the course will be the ways in which new media both reinforce pre-existing social hierarchies, and yet offer possibilities for the transcendence of those very categories. The new media — and we will leave the precise definition of the new media as something to be argued about over the course of the semester — can be yet another means for dividing and disenfranchising, and can be the conduit of violence and transnational dominance.

Berkeley. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

[Via TUAW ]iTunes U, cyberculture, Internet, conduit of violence and transnational dominance

MegaPixel Maven posts a tip on resizing photos in Mail.app using the “Image Size” drop box in the bottom right-hand corner of the Compose window.

As the author points out, you can use this function to reduce an image in the Compose window to Large (1280×800 pixels), Medium (640×400) or Small (320×200) sizes.

Three points:

• Mail does a really bad job of reducing the image. Rob Griffiths ran some tests on this when the tip was posed on macOSXHints last year. He discovered that Photoshop is between 61% and 73% more efficient at the same tasks. Even iPhoto itself does a better job.
• Another option is to use a utility like Downisze or Scale to Mail, which will resize your images efficiently without the need to fire up a monster like Photoshop.
• If you use Claris Emailer, GyazMail, Mailsmith, Outlook Express, PowerMail or QuickMail Pro, Simon Jacquier’s iPhoto Mailer Patcher lets you hack iPhoto to set your email client as the recipient of resized photos. Instructions can be found in an earlier Hawk Wings post.

iphoto, mail.app, apple mail, images, photos, resizing, mailsmith, powermail, gyazmail, tips

My wife’s .Mac subscription is due in a month.

Despite rave reviews like this recent one in the Times Record (“The best $8.25 you’ll spend this month”), I wonder if .Mac is still good value for money.

For less than half the price, USD 40, I can get a 2GB IMAP account and 1GB of WebDAV file space at Fastmail. Other providers no doubt provide deals that are just as good.

A number of apps provide synching abilities for iCal and Address Book (you can find some in the iCal and Address Book sections of the Hawk Wings plug-in and add-on list).

iWeb, Groups and other features are things my wife and I never use.

The only reason I can see for renewing her subscription is to show support for a great company.

Perhaps “value for money” is not the right way to think about it. It’s about belonging. It’s a tribal thing, not a financial decision..Mac, dotmac, value for money, iDisk, iSync, ical, address book

Bounced emails cost their senders USD 5 billion a year, according to a report from the gateway security company IronPort .

The company studied global email traffic and concluded that only 20% of emails are legitimate. Spam makes up 67% of email and bounced emails account for 9%. Viruses infect 3% of email messages worldwide and phishing attacks are less than 1 percent.

Direct Marketing site DMNews reports that “Patrick Peterson, IronPort’s chief technology officer, said he was “shocked” when he first heard about the cost of bounced messages.”email, spam, bounced messages, viruses, phishing