First of all an e-mail Catch All is an email account for your e-mail domain that all misspelled e-mails get delivered to.

So if my e-mail address was colin.diponio @ colindiponio.com

But someone sent an e-mail to colinduponio @ colindiponio.com

In my case It would  end up in my e-mail catch all.

Tip: E-mail addresses are like phone numbers one mistake and they don’t work.

You have two choices

1) Either send these misspelled e-mails to a site black hole and don’t worry about them.

or more sensibly

2) Get a human being to sort through these and manually redirect.

Tip: Most e-mail systems will allow you to create aliases for common misspellings.

Example: Say my e-mail address was published incorrectly in a printed news letter. I would put a redirect of the misspelling forwarding colinduponio to colindiponio.

Based on systems I monitor for my clients in the 20 to 50 users range I can tell you misspelled legitimate e-mails arrive daily. So having someone monitor these is important.

Tip: If you are unsure about what happens with misspelled e-mails in your workplace send a test e-mail from an external e-mail service misspelling your own name and see what happens. If you are lucky you will get a message your can understand like below “User Unknown”.

So the tip for the Small Business Owner is: It might be worth checking that e-mail catch all.

I am unlikely to be a regular purchaser or renter of movies from the iTunes music store. The reason for that is I am a bit of a snob when it comes to the video presentation of movies etc.

I did however want to evaluate the user experience.

I chose a film I wanted to see but didn’t have in any other format.

I am a big Chris Rock fan so I chose his movie Down to Earth.

The 1.02gb download came down in 50 Minutes on my ADSL Max connection. I have an 8mb connection but acts more like a 4mb one.

As you can see from the screen dump the audio is just plain stereo with a video resolution of 853×480. The video carries a 1663kbps bitrate.

Quality

The video quality is only really good enough for playing in a Window (853×480) or on an iPod/iPhone. As soon as you go full screen on any large screen display it starts to get ugly.

So I would say this would be better suited to people who are happy to watch the content on a portable device. Think teenagers or commuters.

Cost

Next up is the cost (£6.99 from iTunes). I could have picked up the DVD of this movie for £4.97. The bare bones DVD would have been better video quality and  have a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack.

The US store sells the same movie for $9.99 or £5.11. So the UK consumer is once again paying more.

In my eyes the sweet spot on pricing would be £3.99 to own or £1.99 to rent. Once again if I can get better quality at a lower price point then I will.

Convenience

Obviously iTunes wins hands down.

Summary

So I like having the choice of being able to quickly access an online store and in some rare occurrences this might come in handy. Example a  rainy day or if I were stuck in a hotel while travelling. However as I said at the start of the post this isn’t really for me.

Tip: As with all content you purchase from iTunes you are responsible for backing it up.

Good old Jeff Atwood published a great post about the performance of high capacity USB Flash drives.

As I discovered myself the larger the drive the more important the performance becomes.

With a lot of Jeff’s Posts you should check out the comments they contain lots of additional information.

If you are interested in getting a high capacity USB flash drive you should check his post.

Link: Large USB Flash Drive Performance