Sunday, June 26, 2005

Spam Fun

As you can see with my spam summary I do get a lot of crap. Am I worried? No, that is the activity with my Yahoo email account. My Sympatico, GMail, Hotmail don't have that problem (yet).

Now why would Yahoo have this much spam? Simple
  1. I do the bulk of my email (other than personal) via this account.
  2. For waranty cards I use my yahoo account for the email address.
  3. For software registration I use my yahoo account for the email address.
  4. I post to two Yahoo stock message groups and I use my Yahoo account as my email address.
It works, my Yahoo account is the only one that gets all of that crap. My personal account has only email from friends and family.

Saturday, June 18, 2005

D-Link problem

Earlier this week our DSL connection speed dropped big time. The curious part was that the Windows machines were running at full speed, but, the Linux boxes were having problems finding web sites. It had the appearance of a DNS problem or someone was trying to DDoS me. I called Sympatico, but, they only support windows (which is only fair to simplify their support). I was going through a number of online sites and found a possible fix. The D-Link box allows you to define the Primary DNS address. I looked at the Status tab and found the DNS IP address and went back to HOME/WAN tab and put in the DNS address and the speed problem on the Linux boxes disappeared.

I dropped a short note to Sympatico describing the fix and they are now looking at putting that information into their knowledge base for others who have the problem (and are not running Windows). If anyone has a technical description of why I will put it up here.

Sunday, June 05, 2005

Phishing & Spam

Today was a real low for emails. My Yahoo account had forty-two emails from Saturday morning until today (Sunday). Of the forty-two only one was a legit message and that was a reply from Paypal about my forwarded note on a phishing attempt. Of the forty-one messages there were three more attempts of phishing and two of those claimed to be from 'Paypal'. The other was claiming to be from another bank. Thirty-eight were porno spam. Just a click select all of those messages and a delete and they were gone. This is why people are probably getting turned off, they have to spend their valuable time getting rid of garbage. This is like having a telemarketer call you collect or junk mail sent postage due.

I hope that the Canadian government takes a good look at the report of the national task force on spam. You can read more at http://e-com.ic.gc.ca/epic/internet/inecic-ceac.nsf/en/h_gv00317e.html. The only upside to all of this spam is that it is on my Yahoo account and not my mail personal email address.

Two of the recommendations that I like and I quote:
There should be an appropriate private right of action available to persons, both individuals and corporations. There should be meaningful statutory damages available to persons who bring civil action.

The businesses whose products or services are being promoted by way of spam should also be held responsible for the spamming. Responsibility should also rest with other third-party beneficiaries of spam.

I like the thought of going after the spammers (if they are in Canada) and make them pay for wasting my time.


If your ISP offers mail filtering take a good look at it and save yourself some time & effort deleting the obvious garbage.