Plaidophile

I use GMail for Domains on both of my main domains (beesbuzz.biz is for personal/arty/online persona stuff, and then I have another domain that is for semi-professional and RL persona stuff). As a result, I have the following Google accounts:

• fluffy at beesbuzz.biz: both a GMail Domain account and an apps account (primarily for Google Reader, and for sharing items and so on)
• [real name] at [other domain]: both GMail Domain account and an apps account (primarily for Google Calendar)
• [real name] at gmail.com: unified GMail+apps account (primarily for my Android phone, since lots of Android stuff doesn't work on apps accounts, and doesn't seem to respect GMail Domain accounts as existing)

However, on the other domain, Google just transitioned it to using the new unified GMail+Apps infrastructure. The major implication of this change is that now to log in to GMail for Domains, that also signs me in to it as an apps account — meaning that I get signed out of Google Reader as 'fluffy' and am logged in as [real name]. While I could in principle just transfer all my data to this apps account, it means losing all of my sharing with others; I'd have to reconnect to everyone with my other domain name, which is not something I want to do.

This also means that when they transition beesbuzz.biz over to the new infrastructure, I won't be able to sign in to both accounts simultaneously for email at all.

Obviously, the least-sucky solution for now is to just set up an IMAP email client on my work machine, but that has legality and privacy implications, or I could use two different browsers at the same time, but that has other obnoxious issues.

This is basically a specific case of the problem as browser-as-OS: when you have single-sign-on to a whole bunch of applications, and those applications don't expect you to have multiple accounts in use at the same time, shit breaks, badly. I heard a while ago that Google was looking into changing their sign-on stuff to allow multiple concurrent apps account signins, which would partially address this issue, but I suspect they'll still screw that up somehow too, and anyway in the meantime I'm going to have to figure out some other approach.

This is the sort of thing which makes me want to just set up my own MX so I can run a decent spam filter without having to put up with Google crap.

I really wish DreamHost still supported some way of running custom filter processes on IMAP-capable mail accounts. It used to be that the email, shell, and web account were all the same one served off the same server, which is obviously a Bad Idea, but they "fixed" things by running the MX and IMAP on servers that have no shell access, and using a web-based panel for configuring procmail chains. Which is fine for the common case, but it makes it so that you can't run custom filters there.

There's also some hackish stuff where you can forward messages to an account that does have shell access (meaning it'd be possible to run a private instance of bogofilter et al), but there's no IMAP support for those, so setting up a training mechanism gets incredibly difficult and cumbersome (and probably involves forwarding messages around to special addresses, which means that you risk losing or misrepresenting header information, which is the single most important part of decent spam filtering in my experience).

I guess for now my best bet is to just install Thunderbird on my work machine for personal email and use that to keep my personal mail separate from my work mail. But again, I'm concerned about the privacy and security implications. Ugh.