Autarchy of the Private Cave

If you want to fetch emails from some of your POP3-enabled mail accounts to Gmail, there’s a help article detailing the process. However, when using Ukrainian Gmail UI, clicking the link which should bring up the dialog box to add one out of maximum five Fetcher accounts, I got instead an offer to add the email address which I can use in the From field of my outgoing emails – and absolutely not a word about fetching emails from other POP3 accounts.

When I switched to English (UK) UI, everything went just as described in the help article, and I added one address to fetch emails from.

After fetching some mails, I switched back to Ukrainian UI, and – quite expectedly – the Fetcher part disappeared from the Settings/Accounts. Now I’m waiting to see if the Fetcher is nonetheless functional, or if it is also disabled… It’s functioning! So the only thing which was really changing in this case was the portion of the Settings/Accounts page not displayed while using Ukrainian UI.

The moral of the story is: when you think that some functionality is missing in the Google service you’re using – just switch to English UI!

Just a minute ago, I was shocked after logging in to mail.bigmir.net: instead of the bigmir’s own, HTML-only email interface, I got redirected at the gmail’s “Terms and conditions”, after accepting which I found my emails in the classic gmail mailbox.

First thing to think about: at least they did transfer all my emails to the new account.

Second: hey, they had given up their own email interface! Are they leaving the web-portal market of Ukraine? Was the part of their team (which later formed MI6) too important to handle their exodus with no consequences? Is that just a desire to give customers “better” interface and not invest anything into development?

I hope this won’t be a trend, for every service to have Google behind their servers. Or even just behind the name, to avoid extra complexity of having a server.

Finally, I think I’ll get used. But it was only yesterday, that I read the Google anti-utopia, where Big Brother’s name is (evidently) Google, and it’s webcams and microphones and search history define each person’s future AND guilt. Scary…

And I wonder which will be the next service of bigmir.net, “outsourced” like their email.

Information taken from: freedom.org.ru

1. www.zoneedit.com; 5 names; A, MX, NS; mail forwarding, web forwarding
2. www.everydns.net; 20 names; A, MX, NS; web forwarding, dynamic domains
3. www.dnspark.com; 3 names; A, MX, NS; web forwarding, mail forwarding, backup MX
4. soa.granitecanyon.com; unlimited names; A, MX, NS (not updated since 2006)
5. www.domain-dns.com; unlimited names; A, MX; web forwarding, paid mail forwarding
6. www.xname.org; no limit; A, MX, NS (I keep several domains there; quite good as for a free service)
7. primaryns.kiev.ua (UA-IX only); unlimited names; A, MX, NS; primary only
8. secondary.net.ua; unlimited names; secondary only
9. ns2.trifle.net; unlimited names; secondary only
10. FreeDNS.ws (suggested in comments; looks promising – I now have one domain there)