This blog and my wife’s @artefxdesign.com domain are hosted at HostGator. I think I am getting good service for the price that I pay. Like many hosting companies, HostGator provides me with Spam Assassin to aid in the war on spam. Unfortunately (a) I can get between 100 and 300 spam messages in one day and (b) Spam Assassin is not easily configured so it doesn’t keep up with the latest spammer techniques.

A ton of spam was finding my inbox and I was getting tired of dealing with it.

I have had a Gmail account for quite some time and guess what?!? Almost no spam! While reading the Gmail documentation, I learned that Google is also looking for and blocking viruses. Bonus! After conversations with local computer geeks, I decided to try an experiment to see if I could kill (or at least wound) the monster that was dumping garbage into my inbox.

I wanted to forward all of my e-mail to my Gmail account and let Google deal with my spam. HostGator gives customers the ability to create e-mail forwarding rules but by default, it will still deliver the messages to the mailboxes on HostGator’s server. To stop that delivery, I had to delete my e-mail account configured in HostGator’s system. Deleting my e-mail account had no affect on my Gmail forwarding rules. HostGator will now forward all of my e-mail to Gmail and it will not retain any copies of the messages.

At this point, my Gmail account was receiving my @gmail.com e-mail and all of the e-mail sent to my other addresses. Cool. Any e-mail that I responded to using Gmail would be sent from my @gmail.com e-mail account. I wanted responses to be sent from the e-mail address that received the original message. Google has a solution for this: Adding a custom ‘From’ address.

Follow the steps to add additional e-mail addresses to your Gmail account. Google will send you verification e-mails to make sure you actually control each address. Once you are verified, you can then go back to the settings and tell Gmail to automatically use the address to which a message was sent.

Next I reconfigured my e-mail client to access my Gmail account via IMAP. I configured the client to download all of the messages automatically. I do this so I can have an offline copy that can be searched and Time Machine can make backups.

So far, Gmail is doing an awesome job blocking spam. It is working so well that set up the whole family, including my mom, with the same configuration using their own Gmail accounts.

Our main Christmas tree was decorated today. I helped with the lights and the ribbon but Mary did the rest.

 

We made it out to Bainbridge Island Farms today to find a Christmas tree. The farm has already cut trees that they truck in but they also have trees growing that you cut yourself.

Last year we cut our own and it lasted way longer than any tree we’ve had before. If the trees can hold out, we tend to leave them up way into January. But, we’ve had a few that barely made it to Christmas day.

Our main tree is the tallest we’ve ever had. It smells so great. I am not sure what kind of tree it is but it smells like oranges.

When I was a kid, my brothers and I had our own tree that we would decorate with our ornaments. Mary and I do the same with Jared. Mary can decorate the main tree the way she wants and Jared can decorate the smaller tree the way he wants.

The puppies are 7 weeks old today. One will be the first to go home to its new family tomorrow. Go to www.rowdryrover.com to see Mary’s latest photos of the puppies.

We took the puppies outside to experience some new sights and sounds. They got up close and personal with one of our chickens and the lawn mower was running in the yard. Mary tries to get them familiar with a lot of different noises early on so they are not afraid.

See the puppies live.

The puppies are doing a little roughhousing. This is just the beginning.

See the puppies live.

We let Tama’s puppies experience the great outdoors for the first time today.

Some more pictures here: Rowdy Rover Blog

Tama’s puppies are starting to eat puppy mush which seems to give them a lot of energy for playtime.

We have a front loading Whirlpool washing machine. In order to keep the water in the tub, the washing machine has a rubber bellows between the tub and the door opening. On Sunday, a pair of jeans worked its way between the spinning tub and the bellows and proceeded to grind down the bellows into rubber dust. That wore a hole in the jeans in the bellows.

I searched the Internet to get an idea of what it might cost to have this fixed. After reading a few forum posts, I figured I would be forking out no less than $300 for a repair visit. Ugh, I really didn’t want to spend that much on my six year old washer.

In the past, I have had appliances break and was able to find parts on the Internet. It was a bit intimidating thinking about trying to replace this giant rubber gasket, but I found step-by-step instructions on how to do it: FixYa – Replacing the Door Bellow On Whirlpool Duet Front Loader. The FixYa site made it sound do’able so I did some searching and found the part that I needed at AppliancePartPros.com: Front tub seal, bellows. After shipping, the new bellows was $94.95.

I took today as a vacation day and Jared had the day off from school for Veterans Day, so we decided to take the washer apart. I figured it would be good to take it apart now while we were waiting for the new bellows in case we found other broken parts (or if we broke parts along the way).

The FixYa instructions were pretty easy to follow and in no time, we had the damaged bellows removed without inflicting any additional damage to our washer.

Rubber dust was on everything.

This evening, we went out for dinner and there at our door was a box containing our new washing machine part! I had just placed the order Sunday night! So after dinner, we returned home and went to work installing the new bellows.

Putting the washer back together was a breeze.

An awesome thing about the FixYa instructions is at the end, it tells you how to start a diagnostics test on the washing machine. This runs the machine through a short rinse and spin cycle to make sure everything is OK. My washer just finished its test and no leaks! I easily just saved myself a couple hundred bucks. Thanks Internet!

Here is a video that I put together of Jared trick-or-treating in downtown Bainbridge Island.