Why I'm dumping my Yahoo email

I've had my Yahoo email account for about 10 years, but am now abandoning it. Why? To simplify my browser experience.

My laptop is always on, connected to the internet, and with my email open in Firefox. The problem is I have several email accounts across several web-based email clients, most of which are using AJAX. AJAX, in my experience, is a pig for resources and sometimes locks up the browser. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of AJAX. I like content on my webpages updating without me clicking refresh. But it can quickly consume a lot of memory slowing me down, it can cause the browser to become unresponsive when it is waiting to fetch content from a page, it's even locked up and caused my browser to crash. I've learned it's best to be very selective about which AJAX sites to keep open.

I tried switching to Yahoo Classic, but frankly it should be called Yahoo Clunky when compared side-by-side with Google Mail. I've grown quite comfortable with Google Mail in the past few years since I've been using it. Most importantly, it allows me to maintain almost all of my email addresses in one place. I say almost all, the exception is my Yahoo mail which doesn't provide forwarding like Google Mail does. Like I said, I want to manage all of my email accounts from 1 place, so Yahoo Mail is getting the boot.

I'll still keep an eye on my Yahoo Mail for the next few weeks, but I've sent out the email announcing my "new" email address and it has been removed from my homepages in Firefox.

Welcome to the Internet

I registered EdBartram.com recently to establish a (semi) professional site for myself. Last weekend I started working with a template to get the ball rolling. I didn't want to publish my email address because I knew I'd get spammed pretty quickly, so I built a contact form in ColdFusion. Four days later I receive a single email from the form containing a whole bunch of links in what appears to be Russian, in other words spam. Mind you, I'm still building the website, I haven't submitted it to any search engines. As far as I knew the site was completely off the radar. Just to prove it while writing this entry, I went to Google and ran a quick search on my domain. My site is listed! How and when did that happen? I checked Google's cached version, it says it was retrieved on the day after I put up the template!

Wow, that's quite a welcome to the Internet for my new site! It is on Google day 2 and received its first spam on Day 5! I can't wait to see what is next...