Geek Rant dot org » Email http://www.geekrant.org Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:44:26 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Top spams http://www.geekrant.org/2012/01/16/top-spams/ http://www.geekrant.org/2012/01/16/top-spams/#comments Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:06:55 +0000 daniel http://www.geekrant.org/?p=2103 The work email server spam filter does not simply reject everything suspicious – this would risk us losing legitimate emails, something made worse by some companies choosing to send invoices and remittances as PDF attachments with no accompanying text whatsoever, something the mail server considers dodgy.

So (until I work out a better, foolproof automated process, or take the time to properly tweak the spam settings on the server) I manually look through some of the doubtful messages to pluck out those that are not actually spam.

The most common types of spam messages caught seem to be…

5. Your credit card is blocked (enter all your details into our dodgy web site)…

4. Work from home and earn $$$…

3. Marry a gorgeous Russian girl…

2. Cheap replica watches (Rolex etc)…

1. Cheap medicine to help gentlemen with, err, size-related personal problems.

…though it appears cheap Canadian pharmacies are also gaining in popularity, despite this being for a .com.au address.

]]> http://www.geekrant.org/2012/01/16/top-spams/feed/ 1 Biggest Gmail spam filter failure I’ve seen in some time http://www.geekrant.org/2011/10/14/gmail-spam-filter-fail/ http://www.geekrant.org/2011/10/14/gmail-spam-filter-fail/#comments Thu, 13 Oct 2011 20:25:18 +0000 daniel http://www.geekrant.org/?p=2077 Usually the GMail spam filter is very good. I wonder what happened this morning.

Gmail spam filter failure

No, I don’t recognise the sender, nor do I recognise any of the other people on the To list. Odd.

(Okay, not an actual filter outage, but certainly the most obvious spam I’ve seen the filter miss recently.)

]]> http://www.geekrant.org/2011/10/14/gmail-spam-filter-fail/feed/ 0 Horde access keys http://www.geekrant.org/2011/04/04/horde-access-keys/ http://www.geekrant.org/2011/04/04/horde-access-keys/#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2011 03:05:46 +0000 daniel http://www.geekrant.org/?p=1947 Beware of Horde’s IMP webmail client and its access/shortcut keys.

One that’s caught me is that if new email composition is set to be in a separate window, and access keys are on, then Alt-F4 (which in Windows is normally the equivalent of Close) is pressed, instead of saving the email to Drafts, or cancelling the email, it sends it.

I’m a common user of Alt-F4, which means several times I’ve thought I was cancelling the email, but instead it’s sent it.

Another is Alt-D for Delete (the current message). On many browsers this predates Ctrl-L to go to the address window, and while I know I should learn Ctrl-L, I still commonly press Alt-D. If Horde is configured to not even put the message into the Trash, carelessly pressing Alt-D will zap the message forever more, no trace left.

To prevent these happening again, I’ve now turned off Access keys: Options / Global options / Display Options / Should access keys be defined for most links?

]]> http://www.geekrant.org/2011/04/04/horde-access-keys/feed/ 0 Amusing comment spam http://www.geekrant.org/2011/02/05/amusing-comment-spam/ http://www.geekrant.org/2011/02/05/amusing-comment-spam/#comments Sat, 05 Feb 2011 02:08:56 +0000 daniel http://www.geekrant.org/?p=1914 Amusing comment spam left on my personal blog:

Spammers leave spam comments in the belief that they will gain better search engine rankings and traffic by building as many links to their websites as possible. Spammers often employ bots or other automated systems to look for mortgage blog and website and leave self serving promotional comments links..Spam is a numbers game so if spammers can send automated spam to large numbers of websites for very little money so even if they convert a small percentage of the sites they spam they can make a profit..Spammers will also leave links to their websites in an attempt to push link juice or Google Juice to their websites but most mortgage websites and blogs add a rel nofollow tag to prevent the passing of pagerank or link juice.

And this one, from a user apparently who signed him/herself “penis enlargement”.

It’s so hard to get backlinks these days, honestly i need a backlink by comments on your blog / forums or guestbook to make my website appear in search engine. I am getting desperate Now! I know you’ll laugh while reading this comment !!! Here is my website penis enlargement [url deleted] I know my comments do not relate to the topic, but PLEASE HELP ME!! APPROVING MY COMMENT!
Regards: PoormanBH2011

Yeah right. Like I’m going to approve that.

BTW, both were caught correctly by Akismet.

]]> http://www.geekrant.org/2011/02/05/amusing-comment-spam/feed/ 0 Email startup times http://www.geekrant.org/2011/01/28/email-startup-times/ http://www.geekrant.org/2011/01/28/email-startup-times/#comments Fri, 28 Jan 2011 03:03:03 +0000 daniel http://www.geekrant.org/?p=1903 Gmail vs ThunderbirdA quick timing test on my main home workhorse computer, which isn’t the fastest in the world, but isn’t the slowest either. (Windows 7, Athlon 64 X2 dual core 4400+ 2300 Mhz, 3 Gb RAM, on a fast ADSL2+ net connection.)

Having started Windows and logged onto a clean desktop:

  • Start Chrome with GMail set as the home page: 8.5 seconds to ready
  • Start Thunderbird: 11.6 seconds to ready

No wonder people are heading into the cloud.

Subsequent timings (without a reboot, so some things may be cached, eg later in a session when you’ve closed your email and you want to go back in):

  • Chrome with GMail: 3.4 seconds
  • Thunderbird: 3.1 seconds

Interesting.

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