The Postal Service is taking a new strategy in its war with electronic mail–if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em.

After last week’s announcement to cancel mail delivery on Saturdays, the Postal Service has decided to route all conventionally delivered Saturday mail over the internet. They have chosen Rackspace Email & Apps as their email hosting service provider for dependability and Fanatical Support.

Their plan is to scan all paper mail, send it to the destination office via email, and print out each piece for hand delivery. Routing and fuel costs provide the majority of savings. Sending each digital piece of mail through Rackspace’s triple layered spam filtering provides even more cost savings by reducing the overall volume by two-thirds.

“It’s amazing how much junk snail mail and spam email have in common”, says Postmaster General, Allegro Monotoni. “Rackspace cuts out most credit card pre-approvals and cable company introductory offers. I have yet to see one ad for Viagra make it through.”

The Postal Service lost $3.8 billion last year, $10 million per Saturday, and plans to provide the same level service at a fraction of the cost.

“We see this as a testing ground. If it goes well for Saturdays, we’ll consider converting our entire delivery to the new hybrid paper-electronic model,” says Monotoni. “Until we investigated Rackspace, I figured a bailout was our only option.”

She tried without any luck after I have fixed the problem for her. That is when she asked me again and I tried, it works smoothly. Couldn’t believe it, she tried again and this time everything works fine.

‘Can I have a picture of you?’ She asked

Astonished at first, but I am soon to find out that she teasingly want to have my picture put on their PCs to serve as ‘門神’. Ancient Chinese way of protecting the safety of home.

門神是中國住宅和佛教道教寺廟大門處的神像，亦見於朝鮮、越南，主要貼在大門或後門，佛教道教寺廟也會在山門處設有門神塑像。門神是木版年畫的主要題材之一。民間傳說最廣的是左右門分別貼的是秦瓊與敬德（尉遲恭），單門則貼的是魏徵或是鍾馗。

Gmail just announced the unique new features, which expect to solve the problem of forget-to-logout, especially when you using public computers.

One need not to be unsured again! You can check your status from your Gmail, and logout any session if you want. How I wish I have one for my mum for her kettle, so we won’t have to turn back half way everytime when we are going somewhere.

One of the latest updates I have received is, email delivered / delayed through smtp-proxy.tm.net.my is also marked as Spam by many major free email service provider including Yahoo Mail!

The Sydney Morning Herald quotes the following…

COMPANIES will be able to intercept the emails and internet communications of their employees without their consent under new laws being considered by the Federal Government to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure from a cyber attack.

The proposed powers, which the Government wants in place by the middle of next year and which could affect millions of workers, have been slammed as an unprecedented and unjustifiable intrusion on civil liberties.

The Government is developing counter-measures, including amending the Telecommunications (Interceptions) Act to allow companies and others operating critical infrastructure to monitor emails and other internet communications without their workers’ consent.

The act allows only security agencies to monitor their employees’ communications without consent. That power expires at the end of June next year and Mr McClelland said he wanted the new legislation to include companies providing services critical to the economy.

In Malaysia, there’s no laws or acts protecting the employees’ privacy. Yes, every emails that you received and sent via your company’s email address is possibly being read by your boss right now.

What this means is that if you have subscribed to a Personal Streamyx account, or a Business Broadband (SOHO Package), you may experience problems with sending out emails with the default settings of port 25, especially if you are sending out emails using your own domain name.

If your customers frequently complain of not receiving your emails, this could be a tell tale sign. Users who are using their Streamyx email accounts may not be affected (example@streamyx.com) by this, since it involves emails on hosted domains (eg info@hosteddomain.com).

Personally, I experienced problems with sending out emails from my locally hosted and foreign hosted domains on port 25 and that is when I discovered this countermeasure by TM Net. In my case, my host Webserver has provided an alternative port, 587 for SMTP and this works much more reliably compared to port 25 (since TM Net is performing heavy filtering on this port). Therefore, it is advisable to contact your web host to find out if they have any alternative ports you can use for SMTP, especially if you experience slowness in sending emails.

This has caused major problems with all StreamyX users who are using email hosting services that is tied to Port 25.

I’ve got no problem with TM going about their spam-reducing activities, but heck, they shouldn’t do that on the expenses of the users email hosting services, which is causing a major customer support disaster worldwide!

TM Malaysia, practice some common sense in whatever you do!

A consortium of six international companies announced they have executed agreements to build a high-bandwidth subsea fiber optic cable linking the United States and Japan. The construction of the new Trans-Pacific infrastructure will cost an estimated US$300 million.

The new cable system – named Unity – will address broadband demand by providing much needed capacity to sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the United States. Unity is expected to initially increase Trans-Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific.