Now for a geeky post: I’ve been playing around with email today.

I receive email at two addresses: my Yahoo address and my Tinmanic.com address. My Tinmanic.com email automatically forwards to my Yahoo address. But I’ve never been able to send email from my Tinmanic address, because I never set up webmail through my web hosting service. (If you’ve corresponded with me, you’ll notice that my emails have all come from Yahoo, not Tinmanic.) My web host gave me three choices — NeoMail, Horde, and Squirrelmail — and they all look sort of icky. Also, I’m tired of always reading my email via the web. It can be slow.

So today I downloaded Thunderbird and managed to set it up so that I can send and receive my Tinmanic.com email from there. I’ve removed the forwarding, so my Tinmanic.com email won’t go to my Yahoo account anymore. (It doesn’t seem to have kicked in yet, though, because I’m still getting Tinmanic email there.)

But then I thought, it’s cumbersome to use two email programs, my Yahoo webmail and my Thunderbird/Tinmanic mail. So I downloaded YPOPs!, which allows you to use your Yahoo mail account through a reader like Thunderbird. That way I’ll be able to do all my emailing via Thunderbird.

I don’t know if this Yahoo thing will totally work. I wonder if I’ll miss using the regular Yahoo web interface or if something will fall through the cracks by my accessing Yahoo mail through Thunderbird.

Also, I’ll now have to set up Thunderbird on the two other computers I use — my home computer and Matt’s computer. And if I’m at a different computer altogether, I won’t be able to access my Tinmanic email.

I wonder if this will be more trouble than it’s worth, all so that I can send out emails that say they’re from “Tin Man” at Tinmanic.com.

“Either this guy believes his party is not serious and is totally Machiavellian in its position, or you know, as David Brock said in his great book ‘Blinded by the Right,’ there’s some sort of self-loathing or something. I was more sad for him.”

— Bill Clinton on Arthur Finkelstein, the gay Republican consultant who recently married his male partner and is planning to fund a Swift-Boat-style ad campaign against Hillary Clinton in her 2006 Senate race.

This phrase from Saturday’s New York Times article about the marriage made me ill: “One of Mr. Finkelstein’s associates, who declined to speak on the record, citing Mr. Finkelstein’s desire for privacy, said Mr. Finkelstein did not view his marriage as a political statement…”

Well, no shit. Do people really think that gays want to get married in order to make a political statement? As I’ve said before, this is not about politics. It’s about people.

I’m not sure how recent this is… but the residents of Atwood, a town in Kansas, voted 984 to 113 to deny same-sex couples any protections for their relationships, even such things as hospital visitation rights. The man who set up the town’s website is gay, so in protest, he took down the website and left a long, heartfelt message. My favorite quote:

Why should you care if 2 people next door or 50 miles away want to spend the rest of their lives together and get the same benefits you enjoy, it’s not going to affect you in the least bit, unless you spy on them. If you don’t like what’s on Television, you change the channel, you don’t get the Government to ban the show.

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