I’ve been getting an extraordinary amount of spam bounce email. One mailbox got thousands and thousands over the weekend, and I know I’m not the only one.

Which means of course that my address is being used in vain by some git of a spammer.

Unfortunately my spam detection software isn’t so crash hot on zapping the bounces, because it’s a bounce, not an actual spam message. And there’s probably not much to be done about spammers forging my address.

After trying in vain to keep up with it all, I eventually blocked the common bounce From address, by adding them to the Plesk blacklist:

mailer-daemon@*
postmaster@*

Hardly ideal, since I’d never see genuine bounces. But it has slowed the flow.

What’s annoying is that about 10-20% of bounces come from a myriad of other addresses. These include the intended recipient’s address, and a variety of apparently semi-random addresses set up as support emails or automatic bounce processes.

There’s also a smattering of “MAILER-DAEMON@” — which isn’t even a legal address. And a lot of them come in with no date field. Very dodgy!

HOW ABOUT SOME STANDARDISATION, PEOPLE?

And maybe it’s time someone came up with a viable way of verifying sender addresses, and stopping From address fraud.

I always knew these types were evil bastards.

Escaped ‘Spam King’ murders family

I’ve often thought spam was demonic.

I’m liking Thunderbird. Ditching Windows Desktop Search and installing Google Desktop Search has worked well — suits my filing system. Well, except for the occasional __GD_something_or_other process that wants to keep running when I’m shutting down the PC.

Things I’ve had to get used to in the switch from Outlook:

Alt-S to Send doesn’t work. Alt-Enter does (Outlook supports that too.)

The column sorting icons being upside-down.

It defaults to sending from the account you’re looking at when you start the new mail, rather than a fixed default. Easily changed if you remember to check it. It also inserts the signature automatically when you change the From account, which is neat.

It didn’t take long to get used to the vastly better IMAP performance in Thunderbird.

I don’t use a Calendar plugin. Tony pointed me to a Nokia phone sync, but I haven’t tried it yet — I do backup my phone contacts, but for most of them I don’t have email details, so syncing is not really a priority for me.

That’s about all at the moment. I’ve imported all my old Outlook folders into Thunderbird, which took ages, but works fine. So, byebye Outlook!

Does anybody still use Mailwasher?

“MailWasher retrieves information about all the emails on the server. With that information (some of which is also processed by MailWasher) you can decide what to do with each individual email - download, delete, or bounce back.

If you check your account with MailWasher first, you can delete or bounce the emails you do not want. Then, when you use your email program, it downloads only the remaining emails, those that you want to read.”

MailWasher’s been around for a while, and I know some people still use it. I tried it some time ago, and it just didn’t seem worth my time to review the headers and choose which items to delete/bounce, as a prelude to actually downloading and reading my email. I might feel differently if I was still on dialup, or perilously close to my download limit. But as it is, if any spam gets through to my mailbox, I’m happy enough deleting it from my email client.

And given the spammers use fake originating addresses and rarely seem to validate the lists they use (I know this because they’ve faked my address as an originator, so I’ve seen the bounces), I’m not convinced bouncing spam back does any good.

So Mailwasher was great in the olden days of dialup, but these days… I guess some people still use it, but I don’t see the need.

Some people have taken to passing their email through Gmail (forward from your email address to Gmail, then read via Gmail’s POP or IMAP access), to make use of Gmail’s spam filters. My ISP has spam filters which work fairly well, so I haven’t resorted to that yet.

So I tried IMAP for Gmail in Thunderbird. And to be honest, while it works, I’ve stopped using it because it’s too slow. Probably due to the sheer distance to the Gmail servers, it plods along compared to my other IMAP servers, and indeed compared to Gmail itself.

In fact, Gmail appears to have had a further upgrade in the last few days which makes the web site even more responsive. Actions such as Delete now appear to happen immediately, with little lag after clicking the button. I reckon they’re doing more processing behind the scenes — the give-away is that if you try and leave the Gmail page straight after doing something like deleting a message, it warns you that you may lose your changes.

They’ve tweaked the interface too, with a highlight > icon showing the current message, a nicer popup for email contacts, and you can Sign Out of chat if you don’t want it bothering you.

And the space available is still creeping up; mine reckons I’ve got almost 5Gb available: “You are currently using 373 MB (7%) of your 4731 MB.”

(I haven’t yet moved all my old Outlook mail to Thunderbird. Want to test out the Windows Desktop Search add-in for Thunderbird, so I know I’ll still be able to find stuff! Alternately I might switch to another search; preferably one that supports both Thunderbird and Gmail.)

A new example: http://sl-weekly.com/

Basically an excerpt from a blog, with a random introductory paragraph up-front to make it look human, presumably in the hope that the trackback will be accepted.

Random introductory paragraphs:

• I’ve a passion for X and keep looking for good articles. Today, I checked if I could find more info by entering ‘Y’ in Google and found this
• People are always asking me to blog more often, well here you go, I looked up some info on ’Y’.
• Last night I used Technorati to find more info on ’Y’ so I could post it into ‘X’. And this is one of the many results I found
• Today I was digging for some info on ’Y’ and came across the following section

Of course, it’s pretty obvious if you look at a few posts in a row. Less so if you’re getting the occasional trackback request.

Works as advertised. A little slower than my local ISP IMAP/SMTP servers, but not too bad, and because Thunderbird will happily wait for a server while you do other stuff, it’s not painful at all.

Gmail’s tags don’t quite translate into IMAP folders, but it’s probably close enough.

Conversations display as separate email messages in Thunderbird. You can use View / Threads to make it similar. Filing stuff in Thunderbird only does one message though, whereas in Gmail that’ll do the whole conversation.

Deleting from Thunderbird moves it to a folder (eg gives it a Label) called [Imap]/Trash — which is how it appears over in GMail. Ideally it would move it to [Gmail]/Trash which seems to match the “real” Gmail Trash, but TB doesn’t have that option.

Sent messages by default go into the TB folder Sent, but this can be changed to match Gmail’s [Gmail]/Sent Mail in TB: Gmail account properties; Copies & Folders; When sending messages; Place a copy in: Other / Sent Mail on Gmail.

Moving messages to [Gmail]/All Mail appears to be the equivalent of pressing the Archive button in Gmail.

There’s a bunch more help on comparing Gmail and IMAP actions.

All in all, works well.

(Reminder: Gmail IMAP is rolling out this week. If your Gmail preferences say “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” then you’ve got it. At present you’ll need to switch to US English for it to be given to you.)

With GMail now offering IMAP (but it’ll take about a week, and you have to switch your Gmail account to US English) I can read all my email boxes from the comfort of the desktop when I’m at home, as long as I have a good IMAP client.

So I’ve tried Thunderbird. I’m quite impressed so far with it; it’s as smooth-as-silk on the IMAP account that Outlook 2007 seems to have so much trouble with. And overall it’s much more responsive (Outlook seems to periodically go out to lunch).

More critical will be the long-term storage of my mail. I’ve got a lot of old stuff in Outlook, and would need to ensure I could migrate it across and make it easily searchable (as easy as via Windows Desktop search) to get rid of Outlook entirely.

One thing about Thunderbird bugs me though: the sort by date column uses icons that seem to be backwards. What’s with that?

And why does the icon look like an envelope wearing a toupee?

So I’m receiving emails, and discover that I’m getting the same thing twice from realestateview; I wonder if they’re duplicates, or there’s overlap, or what. The emails I’m getting don’t tell me what the search criteria that generated them are, but does tell me that

The following recently listed properties match your search criteria.

whatever they are. Helpfully, instructions for changing a search are included:

To change your search, first de-activate your membership using the link above, then go to the Property Search Page to re-enter your new search.

You’re kidding, right? Delete the search, whatever it is because it’s some kind of secret, and then recreate it from the secret search criteria? How the freak is that easy to use? Not only that, when you “deactive my membership”, it’s not clear if just that email-search-thing or all of them will be turned off. Dare I try? Have I anything to lose? I dare, and I try, and it doesn’t tell me what the freak I just did, but it does tell me that it worked.

What moron designed this system?

I’m one of those people whose Inbox slowly gets out of control. Here’s a good article on dealing with it: How to crank through your Gmail. (via Scoble) Of course, the trick for me is finding the time to do the initial cleanup.

I’ve actually almost managed it on my work Inbox. I got it to the stage where there is usually less than a screenful of emails. Virtually everything else goes into a folder called Inbox Archive, which is my Outlook equivalent of GMail’s archive. Of course, if I leave it unchecked for a day or two, the Inbox fills up again.

Got to keep at it constantly.

Someone’s spamming Australian email addresses with a fake news bulletin about PM John Howard having had a heart attack. It includes a link supposedly to The Australian newspaper, but which in fact goes to http://www.theau-news.org/ The spams come from a variety of addresses, with subject lines such as “John Howard, the current Prime Minister of Australia have survived a heart attack” and “Best surgeons are struggling for the life of the Prime Minister”.

The domain was registered only a few days ago, to a post-office box in Nova Scotia, Canada, and apparently the site tries to install malware.

• The Age: Howard heart-attack email carries virus

SYDNEY, February 18, 2007 08:56pm (AEDT) - The Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard have survived a heart attack. Mr Howard, 67 years old, was at Kirribilli House in Sydney, his prime residence, when he was suddenly stricken. Mr Howard was taken to the Royal North Shore Hospital where the best surgeons of Australia are struggling for his life.

Click on the link below to get the latest information on the health of the Prime Minister:

The Australian - keeping the nation informed

(more…)