Autarchy of the Private Cave » services

Google’s services are language-dependent

Bogdan — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:17:32 +0000

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!

Ukrainian web-portal bigmir.net switched from own free email service to gmail

Bogdan — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:05:33 +0000

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.

List of free DNS services

Bogdan — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 13:25:01 +0000

Information taken from: freedom.org.ru

www.zoneedit.com; 5 names; A, MX, NS; mail forwarding, web forwarding
www.everydns.net; 20 names; A, MX, NS; web forwarding, dynamic domains
www.dnspark.com; 3 names; A, MX, NS; web forwarding, mail forwarding, backup MX
www.domain-dns.com; unlimited names; A, MX; web forwarding, paid mail forwarding
www.xname.org; no limit; A, MX, NS (I keep several domains there; quite good as for a free service)
primaryns.kiev.ua (UA-IX only); unlimited names; A, MX, NS; primary only
secondary.net.ua; unlimited names; secondary only
ns2.trifle.net; unlimited names; secondary only
FreeDNS.ws (suggested in comments; looks promising – I now have one domain there)