.Mac still sucks

Even with yesterday’s update, .Mac is still not very useful. The only thing I use my .Mac account for is iSync and as my Apple Store account.

I don’t use my iDisk because it’s too slow. I don’t use .Mac backup; I back up to my Buffalo TeraStation every night using Synk Pro (I formerly used Deja Vu). The server itself is a lot faster than an iDisk.

I don’t use .Mac’s web space since their server doesn’t support PHP or MySQL. I use a Dreamhost account instead, which lets me host multiple domains and gives me a lot more space and bandwidth than even the upgraded .Mac.

I don’t use .Mac email since their lack of good spam filtering makes it useless. I have my .Mac email forwarded to my Dreamhost IMAP mailbox so I can filter it with SpamAssassin & Procmail. I don’t believe in using client-side filtering. Once the spam reaches your mailbox it’s already too late. I’d rather have good server-side filtering that gets rid of the spam before it even reaches my computer. Gmail’s spam filter is much better than .Mac, but I prefer using SpamAssassin on my Dreamhost account, with the rules tweaked to catch almost all spam and whitelists for legitimate mail, and Procmail to trash the detected spam completely. With the high volume of spam, I don’t even bother checking for false positives since I used to get maybe 2-3 a month among several thousand spams.