Archive for 13th December 2007

Chain E-Mails

13 December 2007, 5:55 pm

In 1997 I set up an e-mail account to support several software products I’d written for my (now-former) company. Because customers and potential customers needed to be able to find it easily, I put it on the company web page too. Predictably, it became an instant spam magnet. I couldn’t trust automated spam filters (when dealing with customer e-mails, even a single false positive is unacceptable), so I went through every message and manually decided whether it was spam or not.

Before I turned the account over to a co-worker in 2004, it was getting several hundred spam messages each day. As you may imagine, going through these on a daily basis (weekends included) got very old.

So when my mother, my sisters, and one of my aunts each got e-mail access, and started forwarding good-luck/bad-luck/money chain e-mails and ridiculous hoaxes to me, I didn’t have a lot of patience with them. Continue reading ‘Chain E-Mails’ »

Category: Spam and Malware  |  6 Comments

“Campaign to name US street after Douglas Adams”

13 December 2007, 12:17 am

“42nd Avenue, of course.”

Category: Amusing/Interesting/Appalling  |  2 Comments

purrcast.com?

13 December 2007, 12:16 am

As the saying goes, you can find absolutely anything on the ‘net. I’d say that this site, featuring nothing but the sounds of cats purring and pictures and biographies of the “actors” (purr-tors?), pretty much proves it.

Category: Amusing/Interesting/Appalling  |  4 Comments

“Terry Pratchett has rare, early-onset Alzheimer’s”

13 December 2007, 12:04 am

The full text of the news can be found here.

Category: Uncategorized  |  4 Comments