When asking for help, you need to develop the combination of a thick skin and a grovelling disposition. In my experience, those who are most knowledgeable are helpful, but very very busy. Most of the time, you need to rely on arseholes who have time on their hands to help, but find it more fun to make you suffer first.
Unfortunately, this is not just theoretical. It is the what happens time and time again. Often, the obvious aspects of some technology get patented early which makes it uneconomic to do the necessary optimization of the process for a decade or more.
there's got to be some way we can put the fault on Micro$oft?
Most people on
For your own information
As for your point that serious FM users know all the names and positions of the key folks at FM, that is because of the open communication on the EmailDiscussions forums. It is a compact, transparent organization with good people.
Teh Google is reading my mail, but then it's ignoring most of it. Since the government is already reading my mail, who cares about google?
If you are using Fastmail.FM with secure login, the government most likely is not reading your mail. I suspect NSA can break SSL, but I am confident it is expensive and they only do so on an extremely selective basis.
Okay, so could someone who is familiar with who these guys are explain what they have to offer? From a quick look, my impression is that as a consumer who doesn't necessarily need 5 9's of reliability, there isn't much reason for me to use them over Gmail.
For most casual email users (and even some not so casual) Gmail is quite sufficient. I happen to use Gmail extensively (but not exclusively) myself. However, I have several customers who are small business users and, for them, Fastmail.FM is usually a much superior alternative. It's not just a question of reliability (though FM, today, is more reliable then Gmail) but also because of features. Gmail has better search and a cleaner UI than FM, but otherwise all the feature advantages lie with FM. For instance
These are the kinds of things that really matter to many users.
it ain't cheap to upgrade to gmail levels of storage.
I guess "cheap" is a subjective term. The additional cost to upgrade from "Full" to "Enhanced" membership (6GB email space plus 2GB file space) is US$20 per year. Casual email users might balk at that, but is is surely an acceptable cost for people who use email as a critical tool.
Self-encrypting viruses that choose to infect non-common running process images (i.e. avoid Windows system files) might have different signatures everywhere and still require manual analysis.
Hmmm... This is somewhat similar to an issue mentioned in the article: polymorphic viruses. It raises an interesting question. Do existing AV products try to detect such behavior in newly executed code? I am really not sure how tricky the algorithms would be to detect code that is trying to encrypt itself or modify its own executable code. However, most regular software (funnily enough excepting security software trying to avoid detection by malware!) does not need to do this, so such code should probably be blocked and reported by default.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion