cshen.ca

Gmail has offered the ability to specify different emails that you own as the “From:” address for a long time. This makes consolidating emails easy. When combined with forwarders, one account could handle the emailing of multiple addresses. However, some recipients see a very ugly “From:” address when using this method.

This is because since Gmail is now sending the email instead of the original mail server, it must include the actual Gmail address in the mail headers.

• Delivered-To: recipient@domain.com
• Return-Path: <real@gmail.com>
• MIME-Version: 1.0
• Sender: real@gmail.com
• Subject: email
• From: Chen Shen<new@cshen.ca>
• To: recipient@domain.com

A while ago Google introduced a new function that solves this by routing emails through the actual server of the alternate address. I’ve only recently set it up with my own account, and found the relevant information scattered around the web. This is a compilation of my search results.

The government is trying for the nth time to change Canada’s copyright laws in an effort to please US media overlords, who wish to dictate every detail of how and when Canadians consume media and culture. They want to do this by criminalizing every day activities and imposing hugely disproportionate penalties for these “crimes”.

It is evident, from past bills the government had tried – and failed – to pass, that the goal of this copyright “reform” is to mimic the DMCA of the United States. It is also evident, from numerous examples under the DMCA, that this kind of legislation is a bad idea. One does not have to support file sharing to realize that fines of $1.92 million for allegedly sharing 24 songs, or even $675,000 for 30 songs, can in no way, shape, or form be just, or even sane.

Having spent two weeks navigating the slow and cumbersome goSFU system in search of courses to take next semester, I’m now entirely frustrated at the system for being inexcusably slow and hard to navigate, as well as lacking in basic functions which make registering that much easier. Since I have some free time on my hands, I decided to experiment a bit and see if I can design something that’s more workable, and while I’m at it, make it look as if it belonged in 2009.

I should mention right off the bat that this is an experiment only, and does not represent a viable design for goSFU. There are several noticeable oversights that reflect the quick-and-dirty nature of the design, which I didn’t bother fixing because well, it’s just an experiment.

Note: If you only want to see the design and don’t feel like reading the explanations, skip to the very end.

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin

How does a government eradicate civil liberties? By creating an evil and then pretending to solve it, if only people could give up a little of their freedom. Little by little, one imaginary evil after another, we suddenly find ourselves devoid of the freedoms we once enjoyed, and we have – each and every one of us – become the evil that the government targets.

The strawmen of today are internet criminals: scammers, identity thieves, child pornographers. With the permeance of the internet, they have become the dark, mysterious, scary monsters of our time: a readily available excuse for the government to curtail its population’s freedoms.

I have received emails from the BC Liberals for a while now, every time I get one, I mark it as spam. Why? Because every single email the BC Liberals has ever sent me, is spam. Most of the emails I mark as spam without reading, but from the ones with titles ambiguous enough that I’d click on it, it’s evident that my email was added to some mailing list for BC Liberals propaganda. All form letters, many of which designed to get their supporters do to something.

I have never signed up to any BC Liberals spam list, in fact I have never given them my email address by any means. Their frequent emails are wholly unsolicited and unwanted. How did my address end up on their spam list? My best guess is that a Liberal supporter/organizer who shall remain unnamed took some unrequested liberty with use of my email address. I gave him my email to continue a conversation about some BCYL event I was marginally interested in, nothing was mentioned about being added to a spam list. I decided that the event wouldn’t have worked out with my schedule, and that should have been it, but soon I started receiving BC Liberal spam. Correlated much?