A bit of getting used to. Some labelling took care of most issues though it just wasn’t “what I was used to”. After a week or so, I realize Google spam filter was way better than my own spamassassin setup, which was wonderful. I was manually deleting a dozen spam a day and trying to get spamassassin to learn better, but it was just too much. Google got rid of it all.

I then realized that I wasn’t spending any time at all managing my mail server or my mail folder. No deleting spam, no sorting, no emptying trash, nothing. Then it occurred to me, google isn’t doing that either. I loaded up Thunderbird and logged into my server. I had to download thousands of messages that hadn’t been gathered since I started the gmail process. Of course, I had specified in the gmail setup to leave mail on the server as I was just testing things out. What annoyed me a bit was that it didn’t appear to delete anything on the mail server, even the mail that I had deleted within gmail.

But, all is pretty good regardless. My personal mail server actually has a few accounts on it, all funnelled into one inbox, which is then checked by gmail. I’m able to set aliases up so I can respond right in gmail using any of those email addresses. Guess I should just take the next step and set it to delete mail from the server and be done with it.

I ordered a 500G drive to put inside it, thinking I could use the 2 USB2.0 ports for expansion later if I needed it. The setup software went through alright and I had it up and running in no time. Loading up the web interface, I wondered if this was made by the same company as the Gamer Lounge. It’s just terrible. Nothing is where you think it should be, and it’s all very basic stuff. Looking for the share configuration, I wasn’t impressed to see a full share of the entire drive open read/write to everyone. A quick firmware upgrade, just cause I like doing that, and I set out to start copying data over. Using the network shares first, from my WinXPsp2 desktop, I found the share quickly. My data transfer ran about 6-7M/s according to gkrellm. Not exactly the gigabit performance I was looking for. Trying FTP instead (cause it’s a bad idea to copy 50G+ over a network share), I hoped for faster speeds, but was disappointed again. 6-7M/s. This is barely 100M network speeds.

I was pleased to see I could create email alerts, but was disappointed to see I couldn’t change the SMTP port, which I have to do on Bell Sympatico, since I use my hosted server for a mail server. Suppose I could try and figure out Bell’s mail servers, but it seems like more trouble than it’s worth.

Despite all these negatives, I’m going to keep it, and hope firmware updates will make things better. If not, there’s always a few hacking projects out there that may eventually provide a decent software base for it. I’m not running it as a media centre storage (though you can), I’m just rysncing my pictures to it every now and then.