Spam Tricks

God I hate spam. The latest trick I've been seeing, is messages arriving in my e-mail box with artificially old dates. Since I have my e-mail normally sorted by date (like many people), these spams arrive "off-screen" and waste a bit more of my time as I scroll down to find them. I always know they are there, because my Inbox shows unread messages that clearly aren't visible.

The best defense is to take care with who (or what) can get your e-mail. My ISP allows me to create/remove e-mails at my whim, so I generally always create a special account when signing up for something online. This payed off recently, when I joined a contest for Mt. Dew online. As soon as I joined, my spam to the special account I created jumped to 100 or so junk messages a day!! Jeese, Pepsi sold me out fast enough! I deactivated the account so that spammers would get bounced e-mail. After 2 or so months, I thought I would fire up the account again to see what happens. Not an hour after the account was reactivated, I got several spam messages. By the end of the day, I had about 20 messages! Damn these guys are persistent. Needless to say, I've deep-sixed that account for good.

Fortunately, Netscape's Junk mail filter does a pretty darn good job of catching 98% of the spam I get, but its still annoying. My ISP has something called "SpamAssassin" that I've never turned on, but I've not felt that I've needed it just yet. I'm only getting about 5-10 messages a day that are junk, and that I can tolerate (knocking on wood here).

Now if I could just find a similar tool for filtering out the credit card and mortgage loan ads from my snail mail box, I'd be in pretty good shape!

The Build is Code Red!

Cool link:

Bubble Bubble Build's in Trouble

The only thing I'd change, is that a good build would result in a chilled Mt. Dew, and a bad build would result in a chilled Code Red.

Mmmmmm Dew.

Color Scheme

Despite the fact that I didn't think I wanted to start a blog, I spent way too much time playing with the settings. Now I've got a rather decidedly ugly looking blog that needs a lot of work. Sigh.

What the...?

Not sure I wanted to actually start a blog..... just wanted a username.....

Hmmm.

The Dewkid