Money, money, money!

11:40.18 - Saturday 26th July 2003   (Link to This Entry)

Seems I made a cockup somewhere along the line with my Self-Assessment thingy, but my accountant has sorted it out. He's turned my £500-plus tax bill into a cheque for ... £18.69 - not a huge income but better than losing five hundred squid!

I also stuck a few bits up on eBay to try and raise a few quid while simultaneously clearing a bit of space. I ought to get back into that really.

Spam, Spam Spam, wonderful Spam!

12:24.44 - Saturday 26th July 2003   (Link to This Entry)

For the first time in ages I checked the ol' Spam Trap email address that myself and Mr.Foo use for our surplus Viagra advertisements, and was quite suprised to see only 190 emails therein. "Only 190?" you ask? Well truth be told, unless Foo had cleared it out, and he had no reason to, then 190 messages in the best part of a month is actually doing pretty good.

Without fail, all of the websites I have created have been spammed in one way or another. Either the visible addresses have been harvested from the pages or a random-character-username-at-my-domain-dot-com approach has been successful - either way, a lot of spam comes that nobody signed up for.

I did consider a system whereby someone can only email me if [a] they are in my address book, and [b] their email goes to an address at my domain tied to theirs. For example, if I order a book from Amazon, messages from sales@amazon.co.uk will bounce unless they are sent to amazon.co.uk@mydomain.com and the address sales@amazon.co.uk appears in my address book. This has the effect of 'authenticating' anybody who send me email, and they can be blocked easily enough by simply deleting the address from my address book. If, somehow, someone discovers a combination of the two, I simply change the address that the approved sender should send to and inform them of such - everybody else would bounce.

All that would remain is for a generic address to act as a catchall which I'd go through once a day, checking for genuine new messages from - for example - people who send an enquiry through the website and who do not have their own 'send-to' address at my end as yet. I set one up for them, inform them of the address to send to, and bob's your auntie's live-in lover.