Foo on FatBand!

11:38.36 - Wednesday 2nd April 2003   (Link to This Entry)

W00ty-T00t! Mr.Foo reported today that his ADSL is working and he's enjoying himself immensely. Hurrah for Broadband Britain!

It's turned bloody chilly here at Bl0g Towers. After all that sunshine we're now huddled 'round yonder mug of warm coffee, shivering while we wait for the heating to actually warm the place up. M keeps being a nebby cow, looking over my shoulder... GET OFF, WOMAN!

Ahem.

Holding back the flood...

14:21.01 - Wednesday 2nd April 2003   (Link to This Entry)

One of the advantages of having a domain name and a single POP3 using a catchall is that you can specify any email address you like and you'll still get it. This means you can use a unique address everywhere you sign up for something and, of your email address gets spammed, you can see who leaked it. If you use the email address amazon.co.uk@mydomain.com to join Amazon and you suddenly start receiving spam to that address, then you don't have to look far to find the culprit.

I've been receiving a deluge of spam since asking 123-Reg to submit one of my customer domains to 400 Search Engines, and of course, all the email is sent to promo.customername@mydomain.com - making it easy to track. Promo, by the way, is for 'promotion' - search engine submission, in other words.

The problem I had was that Outlook was still downloading the mail in order to delete it, and due to a quirk in the mailhandling routine, my 'got mail' icon was still being displayed even though said mail had been moved to the trash - they were not being marked as read.

So what I've done is create a spam mail account on the server and given it the alias promo.customer@mydomain.com so that mail goes to there. I don't check this account, and so I don't download the messages, and as it's a 1Mb account it won't be long before the spammers start receiving bounces saying the account is full. As a plus, I can empty the account before signing up to something else and add aliases to it, so it'll handle all of my spam mail. Heheheh.

Woah!

19:57.06 - Wednesday 2nd April 2003   (Link to This Entry)

I got an email from Brittany Spears [sic], subject "I'm so hot and horny!". It simply must be genuine!

Aw poot, I accidentally deleted it.