December: I should be thinking a little bit about Christmas and trying to remember to send a card to those people I always forget. Instead, for some reason, I am worrying about the increasing amount of spam to email accounts that I don’t even use. Demon is my ISP and has been forever. Some of my email addresses are spammed a great deal – I imagine as a result of using Usenet without hiding emails (hey, this was 1994). Demon doesn’t allow me to block mails to a specific address at the server end – it’s all client-side. So, I download it to remove it – or at least I download the mail headers. They do bounce emails after 30 days, and I am going to have to resort to that with one of the mail addresses (the one that put all this in my head as I waited for the 700 headers to download this morning). They, however, have to hold all that mail for 30 days. I don’t want it, nor do they, so please, Mr Demon, deny email to specific addresses – I am thinking of your greater good here. [Related Link: Demon and Spam]
Tag: spam
Better In Just 14 Days
Is Bifidus Digestivum a made up term or is it real? Scientific proof that fewer blog comments makes you less gassy. So, I turned them off.
Today must be like a good dose of Bifidus Digestivum for my database. You know the tellybox ad that tells us that digestive discomfort affects 56% of women, or some such statistic, and then tells us to eat a pro-something yoghurt type thing and in two weeks we won’t feel like we want to fart so much?
Think of junk comments (15,481 of them) and junk trackbacks (3,598 of them) as well as the undetected junk comments & trackbacks (about 7,000 in total) as that bloated feeling and the delete button as a daily helping of tasty Activia from Danone (this blog accepts freebies if you want to contact me). In fact, to help my database get over the discomfort I thought about buying it a blanket and some cushions but it said another Rhubarb Fruit Yoghurt or a tasty Prune Fruit Layer would be better.
So there we go, scientific proof that fewer comments makes you less gassy. So, I turned them off.
Happy 10th Birthday Spam
Spam was ten years old yesterday, and look how it’s grown.
If you’re into celebrations, you might be interested to know that yesterday was spam’s tenth birthday. Ten years ago, a message was posted to Usenet, and Usenet was never really the same again. I do remember a time when Usenet was rendered almost useless thanks to the spam, but I am now finding some newsgroups useful – and much easier to manage than hundreds of emails.
The question right now revolves around the future of email. Will email go the way of Usenet? I suspect not. It’s too fixed in our social and working lives to be abolished. At one time, I thought Instant Messenger looked like it might become the de facto online communication method – but, with hindsight, I think that was wrong.
I am pleased to note that a number of my anti-spam measures have started to kick-in. Demon’s filtering seems to be pretty effective (100s of spam down to 10s). I note Phil Gyford is pleased with his Knowspam.net – I am not sure I want to go that far yet because I don’t think it would be widely accepted (although he is proving that theory wrong).
So, in a bizarre way, Happy Birthday Spam – you’re ten. It’s the next ten years – the teenage years – which are going to be your most difficult.
Maybe Somebody Was Listening
My ISP introduces spam filters!
At the start of December, I wrote again about spam in my mailbox and suggested that my ISP, Demon, should do something to allow server-side filtering of mail messages. Hoorah, my January post brought good news and spam filtering is to be introduced. Maybe some of those email addresses will become useful again!