Faith's computer hard drive has been acting up so I've been spending time on the machine setting up backups and helping to recover from corrupted files. Last night, as I was setting up a weblog for her, I noticed that when she checked email there was a bunch of spam.
I've trimmed my email spam down to hardly anything at all and thought that my techniques might be useful to others. Unfortunately this won't help you get rid of spam on an existing account, but it can help you to keep the next email account clean.
Avoiding spam in the first place:
- Get a free email account (or two!), we'll call this your pMail.
(Zeke checks his pMail each time we go for a walk) - Never, under ANY circumstances, use your real email account for online activity.
- Use your pMail:
- for contacts you don't know very well
- for contests
- for online shopping
- for posting ads, ebay, lonely hearts club, etc...
- for newsgroups and message boards
- for your own website/log (unless you have form mail...more later)
- for friends/relatives who ALWAYS get viruses
- when in doubt give out the pMail address...
(you can always give out your real email later, once you know/trust someone)
- Have one pMail for completely untrusted (mostly garbage) and one for questionable sources, makes things easier to filter
- Check pMail once a week, maybe more often if you are expecting something
What to do when you get spam:
- Never, ever, ever, reply. There's isn't a human on the other end, even if it is a person.
- Don't view it! HTML email has embedded graphics which, when viewed, can signal the spam sender that the email account is valid...resulting in more spam!
(Apple Mail turn off display images and embedded objects(html). Other apps turn off preview. Or, select a non-spam message and then shift click the spam emails to create a group for deletion) - If your mail program has the feature (Apple Mail) mark it as spam (or rather, mark a group of them so you don't have to view it)
The ultimate weapon:
Get your own domain (i.e. jerryrig.com). This also means you can make up any email account you like. For example, when you deal with a website often you can make an email account just for that website. If you start getting spam from that address, well, maybe they sold your name? Either way, you can then easily change the email address and toss those emails into the garbage automatically. Dont' give up your pMail though, it's still a great first level filter.
If you have your own domain and a website, don't post your email address, instead put up a form which allows folks to email you. There's a bunch of scripts for doing this (although the old formmail.cgi/pl seems to have a hole) and it lets people contact you without putting your email on the web page.
Spammers use spiders. Spiders are programs that go out and look at all of pages they can find on the web and pluck off any email address they encounter. They spider weblogs, websites, newsgroups, you name it. I posted a brand new email address on a few of my web pages for less than two weeks, yet it was long enough to be spidered and spread to every spammer out there.
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Woke up a little before four this morning. Well, actually, with the way my internal alarm clock works I woke up at 1 at 2 at 3 and a few points in-between. The sky was twinkly clear with the moon not quite above the tree line. I dragged the telescope outside to give it time to cool down and brewed a pot of coffee.
Hot coffee in hand, barefooted and in a robe out on the cool damp deck, I swung the telescope over to Pleiades to take a peek. Mars was out of the question, too low above our roof-line for the scope to see. I think Faith will be thrilled with my new plans for a rooftop observing deck!
About that time the Moon was untangling itself from the last of the branches so I lined the telescope up and took a look. Holy crap! What a view! The pictures hardly do justice to the stark and stunning lunar surface. Even in its diminished state the Moon is extremely bright. I experimented with positioning the brighter section out of the eyepiece view so I could examine the shaded areas. Very cool.
After that it seemed anti-climatic to look anywhere else, although I did check out Saturn and some of the stars on Orion's belt. By that time the sky started getting lighter and the night sky called it quits once again.
Jer,
Agreed, very cool lunar photos. Did you take that photo with your A70? If so, I'm even gladder that I purchased that model.
In case you or anyone's interested, I'm into ginger beer, batch the third. This one's the fizziest yet. Addenda to the recipe for batch, the second, are on my 'blog.
Thanks,
Mike.
All photos are taken with the A70 now. It's kind of strange taking photos through the telescope since there's an amazing variety of lens setups, focusing options, and light control variations to contend with.
You must have a monster fridge to hold so much Ginger Beer! One thing I noticed is that depending on where you put it in the fridge the fermentation may still continue, albeit at a slower pace. In other words don't misplace one in the back of the fridge or you'll hear about it in a month or so!
Too true, Jer, too true. This batch is very, ahhh, lively. Lucky my roommate and I got through about a gallon every few days.
I saw your pipe, pond and wire woes...All I can say is it gives me new respect for the wiring contractors on a rapid transit job I did some work on this summer. Having to yank wires for signalling, traction power, switching, communication... through banks of 4" conduits, each a few hundred yards long... Must be just brutal. Good luck on that!
Mike.