Rumblings and mumblings.

July 21, 2004

I had some witty story to tell that I thought of either yesterday or this morning, but I’ve completely forgotten it. I guess that’s one side-effect of being busy at work and tired at home.

My email provider implemented something today I’ve been hoping for. As the amount of spam I’ve gotten has risen, I’ve had to change tactics in making sure that it doesn’t appear in my inbox at all. I didn’t get any at all at first, and then when it started picking up I began “bouncing” emails back to the spammer to make it look like it wasn’t a valid email account. In theory, spammers would see the bounce and remove your email address from their database because it wasn’t good.

In theory.

I don’t think it actually worked that way, and in practice all it did was make me have to see every piece of spam I got and manually do something to it. I didn’t have to read them, but I saw them. Plus, part of the problem with spam is that it’s literally clogging up the Internet. If spam were to literally stop right this moment, you’d find that your email would arrive at its destination faster, downloads would probably go a little quicker, and the servers controlling the root of the Internet wouldn’t be nearly so powerful. Bouncing an email just adds to the mess. So I started deleting them right off the server befroe they were downloaded. Good in practice, but once again I still have to manually do something to every spam I get. Finally when things started getting too much for me to sanely handle, I just turned on my email client’s anti-spam protection. You teach it what’s spam and what’s not, and based on the teaching you give the filter it can tell what you don’t want in your inbox and what you DO want in your inbox.

But my email provider runs a top-notch anti-spam program at the server level. Messages received to my account are scanned and rejected if they meet a certain level of criteria, not even making it to my inbox. Unfortunately, spammers have ways of getting around the rules. So my email provider just implemented the same sort of system I have in my email client, a learning filter. You teach it what’s spam and what’s not, and it remembers the rules you set for it. But for the process of testing, they’ve linked the two anti-spam filters together, meaning that when the first one, the one that can reject an email altogether, marks something as spam, it teaches the learning one of its findings. Hypothetically that takes me entirely out of the equation for teaching, and all I have to do is make sure that no false positives are marked as spam.

I like this. I could get used to this. To help train my learning filter, I turned off the rejection feature, so now I’m getting all the spam that comes to me, but it’s being filtered into a folder in my account. So now all spam that comes in will be marked as spam, and my learning filter will be pretty smart by the time I’m done with it.

Speaking of my email provider, I can’t remember if I mentioned it, but the company I use is located in Norway. I didn’t know that when I signed up with them, but from a privacy perspective I like the idea. If the US government for some reason wants to read my email, they’ll have to talk with the Norwegian government because all my email is stored remotely in a foreign country, and I just view it, I don’t actually download a copy to my computer. It’s not that I’m afraid of being spied on (nor do I have something to hide), but in this day and age of abuses of the Patriot Act, you can’t be too careful. And from what I understand, Norway has a pretty thorough digital privacy protection act.

I finally got the RAM I ordered off eBay on July 1st. It turned out that the package had gotten routed to Illinois for some reason, sat there for ten or more business days, then finally gotten sent to me. The seller hadn’t sent me a tracking number and then had a family emergency come up and was unavailable for awhile. But it all turned out in the end, and since he was so nice about it I’ll leave him positive feedback. In other news, my TiVo comes tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to setting it up and playing with it.

I had chicken teriyaki bento for lunch today because I just didn’t feel like cereal, but now that my lunch is over with it’s time to get back to work. We have a deadline coming up, and my boss has called three times today asking me questions. So…back to the grind. Later.

Posted in Geekery, General