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Filed under: Internet, MobileMe

MobileMe silently filtering email to spamcop.net

According to Mac OS X Hints, if you're trying to send an email to someone with a spamcop.net email address with your MobileMe account, chances are the message will never arrive, and you won't be notified.

What's worse, apparently if you're sending the message to a distribution list, and only one of those recipients has an address at spamcop.net, nobody will receive the message.

Apparently the problem has been happening for months, since Apple moved everyone from .Mac to MobileMe. A participant in the Apple Discussions thread notes that it's common for service providers to filter their outgoing mail by domain in order to avoid being blacklisted. So far, only spamcop.net appears to be affected.

A workaround for now would be to try to send the message using a different email account. We'll let you know if Apple offers a fix in the meantime.

Update: Friendly reader Jason sent me a detailed explanation about why this might be. In a misguided attempt to control their individual load of spam, some users choose to forward all their MobileMe mail to a spamcop.net address. Spamcop, unfortunately, thinks the "spam" originated at MobileMe, not the actual origin of the spammy badness. So, MobileMe, to combat this, forbids forwarding to domains like Spamcop in order to avoid being blacklisted. There's nothing sinister going on here, just honest network administrators doing what they can with what they've got. Thanks, Jason!

Filed under: Software, Internet Tools

ChatFX - video effects within iChat

ChatFX can bring some fun to your iChat video conferences by adding quirky video effects; basically it's like Apple's Photo Booth for iChat. Using the power of Quartz Composer (built into Mac OS X 10.4), ChatFX can apply eight different effects to your video conference in real time, including a green-screen effect for that perfect "sure, I'm still at school/the office" cover story. Using  the green screen, you can even place a movie in the background - the sky's the limit with that feature.

ChatFX offers a demo download and sells for $20.

Filed under: Software, Cool tools

ChocoFlop - powerful image editing


Even as an alpha image editor, I think it's safe to dub ChocoFlop a true "poor man's Photoshop." It offers layers, real-time preview of filters and effects (of which there are many), a slew of selection tools, blending modes, masks, color adjusting and a whole bunch of file formats it can save to and even more it can read from - including many versions of RAW. For the full details, check out the longest image editor feature list I've seen in a long time.

As an alpha it's free, and the author has stated on his blog that, once it goes official and commercial, ChocoFlop won't cost more than $50 USD. I haven't cracked this open yet myself, but if you've been looking for a powerful image editor that offers quite a bit more than the standard CoreImage-based options out there, ChocoFlop should be right up your alley.

Filed under: Multimedia, Software

Image Tricks 2.0

I'm beginning to think that today is some kind of image editing holiday, as Image Tricks, the freeware image editor that leverages Mac OS X Tiger's Core Image features, has been updated to version 2. New features include 'generators' - the ability to "randomly and manually generate images with mathematical algorithms," a fit-to-size option, PDF export, file size adjustment when exporting to JPEG, and other minor fixes and improvements.

Image Tricks has also been divided into Free and Pro versions. For a mere $9.95 the Pro version will give you six more generators than the free version, and BeLight software has stated they have more generators they can add from their todo list if enough customers show interest.

Check out BeLight Software's  Image Tricks product page for more details on its abilities, and the downloads page for a copy of the upgradable Free version.

Tip of the Day

Holding the Command key (aka the Apple key) and pressing Tab will cycle through your open applications. It's easier to Cmd-Tab if you are Copy (Cmd-C) and Pasting (Cmd-V) to and from various applications.


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