Rogers (Internet, Cable, Home Phone, Mobile, Music Store, and, I think, fascist regime in a small part of South Asia) are pioneers when it comes to fucking their customers. They were one of the first ISPs to block (well, packet shape) BitTorrent Traffic, claiming it used up to much bandwidth.
Creative as pirates are, however, there was soon an easy way to encrypt your traffic and avoid the package shaping. Rogers, frustrated by the rights of their customers to use the service they’re paying for, decided the best way to solve this problem was to block all encrypted traffic. All encrypted traffic. Me, a paying Roger’s customer (with the most expensive plan), then get’s frustrated when my shit doesn’t work. Because of course, it’s not like they sent me an email about it when they fucked me over, no, I was left to be frustrated until I read about it on the internet.
Ok, rant over. Those fuckers make me angry though. I was going to wait till I moved to switch ISPs, but I don’t think I will now.
Today I’m going to give you two tips, since they are both quite easy to implement.
Tip One: Unlimited Addresses
This is one of the simplest, and yet most powerful features of Gmail. With the use of a simple +, you can have as many e-mail addresses as you desire. An example: say I had the e-mail defrex@gmail.com as my spam account. I could use defrex+blog@gmail.com, and the e-mail would go to the same place. So would defrex+anything@gmail.com and defrex+itunes@gmail.com. It’s genius, really. With this, I can sign up to YouTube with defrex+youtube@gmail.com and Digg with defrex+digg@gmail.com. Why is this good? Because, if YouTube were to sell my e-mail, and I started getting lots of spam sent to defrex+youtube@gmail.com, I could easily create a filter that killed all e-mail sent to that address, without worrying about losing my whole address.
Possible snag: some web sites don’t like the plus sign. They will give you an invalid e-mail error. For those sites I just use the spam address without the +. It works for most places though.
Tip Two: E-mail Encryption
When you enter your password into Gmail, it automatically encrypts the connection, however all the e-mails you write and send are not encrypted. This is easily changed. When you go to Gmail, instead of going to http://mail.google.com, go to https://mail.google.com. While manually typing “https://mail.google.com” is a little annoying (rather then “gmail.com”), it becomes transparent when you make the change in your bookmarks. Simply right click on the bookmark, go to properties, and add an “s” after “http”. Your e-mail will hence be encrypted.
Why bother? Personally, I believe internet security should be practiced all the time, even though it’s not always crucial. One day it will be, and that day you will wish you were encrypted. It is surprisingly easy for someone to monitor everything you do online that is not encrypted. People set up bots that mine sensitive information, and e-mail is a prime source. It’s better to be safe then sorry.