My day job is Managing Director of The Very Good Email Company. We are a small business with just a handful of people working from home mostly.
On a daily basis we deal with people who have issues with configuring their email client software or just using their computers. Many of these are completely non-technical and some are quite elderly. For anyone who has had to provide IT support to their parents, you’ll know how tricky this can be!
The purpose of this section is to provide educational material, opinions and the occasional rant!
I’ll start by laying my cards on the table. I use a Mac. Have done since 2004. Don’t like Microsoft, never have. For the largest software company in the world, their software is terrible, overcomplicated, and slow. Worst of all, they don’t follow standards, so you need specially trained people just to understand their software.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy and are informed by the articles below!
Articles
- Training AI with AI (22 March, 2026) - One of my latest projects involves using AI to classify Emails as Spam/Scam/Phishing etc. In order for this to work at any sort of scale, I need fast and cheap AI. Claude is my AI of choice but far too expensive for the task at hand, so we’ve elected to use OpenAI’s gpt-5.4-nano model. This […]
- Claude plays golf in Spain (16 December, 2025) - Using Ai in Anger I finally did it. Found a really good use for AI that I can put to practical use, and who knows, maybe start a new business from it. So once again, my elbow is playing up! So I’m playing less golf, and you know what they say about idle hands… Anyway, […]
- MailCore Send (2 November, 2025) - Recently I’ve been suffering with some elbow problems, which has prevented me from playing as much golf as I would like. So about a month ago, I took some time away from golf to recuperate and went and hid in my mountain house for a week to avoid the temptation of golf, and avoid distractions […]
- Eating my own dog food (14 August, 2025) - I recently was re-acquainted with an old software development term. Eating your own dog food. Here’s the story… At my work, which is the business of email services, we provide a webmail interface. This, I believed, was for emergency or occasional access to email when away from your normal devices. Not so for many people, […]
- Thunderbird Autoconfig (29 July, 2025) - Today, as part of our effort to move people away from Outlook and onto Thunderbird, I thought I’d have another look into autoconfiguring it. We already have it working for email setups, but Thunderbird now supports Calendars and Contacts as well using CalDAV and CardDAV protocols. After some googling and much assistance from claude.ai, we […]