Aperture

So, like the rest of the planet you are just another Yahoo, Gmail, Live, or whatever free web mail service. That’s good, but what can be better? How about buying or renting a domain name and setup unique email addresses?

Do you currently own a domain and you’re not willing to go through the hassle of setting up a mail server? How about a small business, where spending on setting up IT infrastructure isn’t the wisest thing for the moment but still want your employees / partners to communicate under a standard company email addresses. Would you allow Laurence, the sales guy to send messages to customers from Laurence@gmail.com and even print that on the business cards? Nah!

A few years ago a simple trick would do the job. That was: going to your DNS service provider and activate email forwarding. Meaning that all messages that were sent to “someone@yourdomain.com” would be forwarded to you free web mail service of choice. My choice at the time (and present also) was Google. Google, likewise other free web mail services would allow you to setup a “send as” address upon validation that you own the address “someone@yourdomain.com”, which was fairly easy, since “someone@yourdomain.com” was already forwarded to your web mail service with the validation code inside.

While the solution above is fairly easy and practical, has a single drawback. Messages are forwarded OK, however, upon replying or composing a new message designated to be send via “send as” feature would appear as “your_gmail_account@googlemail.com on Behalf of someone@yourdomain.com”. Not good…

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Today wireless is everywhere. In any point of your city you’ll find a dozen wireless access points with your laptop/PDA, more or less secured. In office buildings, on the streets, in the parc, in your neighborhood (no matter if you live in a residence or an apartment building).

Adding wireless to your home is cool since you can connect devices to your home LAN without drilling holes in your walls and fill them with wires to enable internet access from your bedroom or connect your HTPC to your wireless NAS.

Choosing an access point is easy since the technology itself is already matured enough and usually you cannot go wrong with products from Asus, Acer, MSI, Netgear, D-link, Zyxel and others. My pick however is Linksys. Mostly because is a Cisco Systems OEM (I feel a bit nostalgic for my network administration period). Secondly is price (more expensive in his class, but still very affordable). The third reason is signal strength: 2 layers of concrete walls are not a problem for a Linksys (I can pick up my network from across the street actually, or browse the internet from my toilet – well, I’m not actually doing this, but the potential is there and ready to be leveraged… ).

But why should you get a wireless access point when you can get a wireless router for the same money, while having increased functionality of the equipment? A wireless router can be setup as a plain a wireless access point as well as directly connect your home network to your ADSL modem, PPPoE ISP, just plain WAN ethernet interface. Wireless router can also be used to connect 2 or more wireless networks. In need of a DMZ? Can be done.

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