Symphonious

Continuing my spam theme of late. Today I received a message from “* Rochelle *” that wound up in my inbox. Since I have so many carefully crafted filters to dump mail in the appropriate mailbox anything that winds up in my inbox is immediately suspected as spam that spamassassin missed. This message hit massive alarm bells in my head and I just couldn’t work out why spamassassin had missed it. The subject line was “hey!!!” and the body of the message was bright pink with embedded images that Mail.app had blocked. Worst of all, it was from a hotmail address similar to “I’m your lollypop”.

Naturally that first quick glance was enough for me to start dragging it to the spam folder. While doing so I fortunately noticed the phrase “Tom’s birthday party” and it just seemed too much of a coincidence considering I’d attended my cousin Tom’s birthday party a couple of weeks ago.

Turns out the mail was legit and from someone I’d been waiting to hear from for a fair while.

The moral of the story - trust in spamassassin. Or maybe, look before you hit delete as spam. Or maybe that you shouldn’t use hotmail addresses that include talk of lollipops along with HTML email and bright pink backgrounds. Yeah, definitely don’t do the pink background thing…..

Richard Giles comments on SpamSaver, one of the worst ideas I’ve heard of in a long time.

Essentially SpamSaver aims to feed a massive number of useless email addresses into the spammer’s database making it all but useless and swamping them with bounced mail. Sadly, the flaw lies in the last part - the spammers don’t see the bounced mail - the poor sap who’s email address they forged does. PLEASE don’t contribute to more of this “bounce-spam”, it’s already reached the point where I receive more bounce messages than I do actual spam. Mostly that’s from virus bounce messages, but an increasing amount is from spam bounce messages too and things like SpamSaver will only make that worse.

So please don’t use SpamSaver and if you’re a sysadmin configure your servers to never send automatic emails for any reason. I don’t care if the email address doesn’t exist, I don’t care if the message had a virus and I really don’t care if the person is on vacation. Unless you can be 100% sure that the From: address is real (which you can’t) don’t send mail to it.

It’s a long weekend here in Australia for ANZAC day so I’m considering going on a road trip. Not sure where I’m going yet, but my last road trip took me down into northern New South Wales and I’m thinking of heading down that way again - I figure my random selection of which way to turn should take me somewhere else this time (I don’t actually own a map of anything outside of the Brisbane region). I’m considering trying to get to a national park I vaguely remember around there, but I can’t remember the name of it or where it is so I’m not sure how much success I’ll have with that plan.

Anyone got any suggestions for places to go for a day trip or possibly an overnighter around Brisbane?

With all the crisis and the shooting and the killing in Iraq, it’s good to see that the American military has found a solution: an upgrade to Active Directory. I mean, once the Iraqis see how much better their life is with Active Directory instead of Windows NT 4 based networking, they won’t care if their home has been blown to smithereens, if their children have been shot and if they’re starving to death.

Cue music

What the world, needs now.
Is Active Directory.
It’s the only thing,
That there’s just,
Too little of….

Ian Holsman comments on a vacation responder that deletes all incoming email to avoid their mailbox overflowing while they’re away and asks if email is dead.

The answer is a clear no. Email is now a critical system, it just can’t be killed, perhaps morphed into a different set of protocols but the concept of sending mail electronically just can’t die, unless you count being replaced with sending video messages electronically as killing email.

However, email is no longer a time saver, it’s a great time waster. It’s a chore that you have to put up with to stay in business or to stay in touch with your widely dispersed friends.

With the recent demise of our exchange mail server I’ve had to change the way I filter out spam which requires training up a new spam filter and in the process receiving massive amounts of spam. I honestly never realised just how much spam I received until I suddenly didn’t have a filter in place to get rid of it. Without that filter, email is completely unusable and with a poorly trained filter it’s a great waste of time.

We’ve now outsourced our exchange server and I can go back to happily using SpamBayes with Outlook. I’ve run it over the 14000 stored spam messages that I managed to recover from our dead exchange box (massive amounts of real email got nuked, but the spam survived….) and trained up the new filter, but it’s still not as good. I’m not sure why.

I’ve also found that when you receive large amounts of spam the best thing you can do for your productivity is turn off the new email notification. Noone notices if it takes you 30 mins to reply to an email instead of 5 mins and by turning off that notification you’re no longer interrupted by spam messages (or real messages) every 1-5 minutes. You check you’re email when you want not when it wants. Also, by leaving your email open you still have a reminder on screen to pay attention to email every so often and it’s quick and easy to bring the window back up and check if you have new email.

The other thing you need to do is have a really huge amount of space available in your mailbox, whether that’s achieved by actually having a large mailbox or just having a fetchmail (or similar) process running to constantly download your mail to your own computer for storage, it’s got to be there. That avoids the problem of spam filling up your in box.

Finally, train your spam filter to treat any bounce message as spam and discard it. At least 50% of the unwanted email I get is actually bounce messages either for incorrect addresses or virus detection notifications. If you’re a system administrator, turn off all bounce messages, they no longer serve any useful purpose and are just clogging up people’s inboxes.