Hallowe'en II: Boxing Day

Here's a scary/stupid trick to pull if you, like me, are a finalist for Biggest Email Pack Rat On The Internet.

Open Apple Mail's Preferences, select the "General" tab, and change Dock unread count from Inbox Only to All Mailboxes. I double-dare you.

Or, it might just be too depressing. I went from a mere(!) 355 unread messages to…

56,232

Let's see, at an average of just under 2 minutes each (clocked over a recent week), cleaning that out would take me some 78 days, 2 hours and 24 minutes, during which some 31,000 new emails (not including auto-filtered spam at ~85% of total incoming email) would arrive. Assuming I could stay awake that long. Caffeine is The Elixir of Life™, but… "filling a baby's eyedropper from a raging waterfall" does not even begin to do the image justice. Maybe the old Ragú ad slogan, "It's In There".

There has to be a better way.

ANFSD: GnuPG Semi-Pro Tip

After you use GNU Privacy Guard, or really any public-key encryption system, for a while, you'll probably have it set up for more than one of your email addresses. It's tempting to have the same pass-phrase for all your IDs.

Don't.

For instance, I use long-ish pass-phrases that are similar enough to remember easily but different enough that a dictionary attack is highly unlikely to be successful. That also protects me from doing something silly/confusing/potentially dangerous like thinking I'm sending from one email address when my email package actually defaults to another. Since the pass-phrases differ, you can't sign a message sent with Account B with the phrase from Account A (that you thought you were using but you were in too much of a hurry to pay attention to the 'From' line).