For the last 24 hours I have tracked incoming spam to my email address. During that time I received a total of 225 spam messages. 163 of these messages were properly filtered on the server as spam, but unfortunately 62 spam messages were not caught by the server. This means I need to tweak the server settings more. At one time my server caught approximately 90% of incoming spam which no longer seems to be the case.
Good news is 54 of the 62 spam messages were caught by my email client. The other good news is I am seeing a major reduction in total spam received since I started masking my email address.
I’ve been heads down all day working on SMTP Diagnostics. I did more work on the print preview, added an icon legend, and started work on the help file. The help file is probably 70% complete. Hopefully I can get the Chief Content Editor for White Peak (a.k.a., my wife Melanie) to review the help file this weekend.
I feel the app is ready for public release but I still have a number of “administrative” tasks to complete before I can release it. For instance SMTP Diagnostics still does not have a home page, and I need to setup the web store so users can purchase a license. I hope to have these things in place within the next couple of weeks.
Shoot me an email if you are interested in reviewing the preview release.
The EU Parliament rejects the software patents directive. Click here to read more. Now if only the U.S. could get its act together regard software patents.
| Attention @thecave.com mail users: A number of you have reported an increase in the number of spam messages received. I have adjusted the spam filter rules in hopes to reduce this number. Please note that messages flagged with spam probabilities of MEDIUM and HIGH are automatically moved to your Junk Mail folder. You can override this to have HIGH messages automatically deleted by going to Settings | My Spam Filtering from the SmarterMail web interface. If you do not want to delete HIGH probability spam messages right away, you can use the auto-clean feature. I use this to force spam messages to be deleted automatically after a few days. This gives me a few days to check my Junk Mail folder should someone report sending me an report that was mistakenly flagged as MEDIUM or HIGH. To setup the auto-clean, go to Settings |
My Folder Auto-Clean from the SmarterMail web interface. Tick the “Enable auto-clean for this folder” box found under the Junk E-mail heading. Set the size before to auto-clean to 3 MB and the size after to 2 MB. This should keep the message around for a few days to a week depending on the amount of spam in your Junk Folder. Comment or email me if you have specific questions regarding your @thecave.com email account. |
| I purchased the Greatis Print Suite Pro today so I can add print and print preview features to SMTP Diagnostics. The components are nice but the installation is a pain for those new to Delphi 2005. And unfortunately the documentation does not include how to install under D2005. Fortunately I was able to find a way to install the components. Here’s the steps I followed to install the component suite: - Created a new package project (File |
New | Package). - Added PrintSuiteReg.pas to the project. - Added PrintJobsReg.pas to the project. - Compiled and Installed the package. |
It’s been 48 hours since I changed e-mail to email and the winner is “email”. It seems the google will search for both “e-mail” and “email” when “email” is used in the search string. However, it will only search for “e-mail” when “e-mail” is used in the search string. Based on this I will stop using the dash when I write the word email.
On a related note, I found google has index the wrong page on my site when searching the phrase “Masking Addresses to Prevent Email Harvesting”. It has indexed the page www.whitepeaksoftware.com/blog.aspx?xml/2005_06_01_archive.xml but I assumed it would have indexed the page http://www.whitepeaksoftware.com/archive/2005/06/25/masking_addresses_to_prevent_email_harvesting.aspx. Go figure.
Also, I wonder how google will index my blog entries given that each entry is available from thecave.com and whitepeaksoftware.com. Time will tell.
I discovered this great site covering the basics of Delphi, perfect for those new to Delphi or those looking for a refresher.
I sometime find cell phones a pain. For example, it’s next to impossible to hold a modern cell phones up to your ear using your shoulder. Sure, you can use a headset but I can’t count the number of times I have disconnected a call while trying to connect my headset and talk at the same time. Okay, so it’s less than 5 times but still…
The folks at at Spark Fun Electronics have come up with what I believe is the first portable rotary phone, and this puppy can be yours for a little as $399. Not sure if the portable rotary phone is right for you? Well, here’s a review that might help you decide.
David I posted a blog about the upcoming 24 Hour Delphi event on BDN Radio scheduled for July 13. This should be an interesting Internet radio broadcast.
The Federal Trade Commission published a report on e-mail harvesting. Investigators seeded 175 different locations with 250 new e-mail addresses to see what would happen. Over 3,000 spam messages were received during the first six weeks. The investigators found:<ul>
<li>“86 percent of the addresses posted to web pages received spam. It didn’t matter where the addresses were posted on the page: if the address had the “@” sign in it, it drew spam.”</li>
<li>“86 percent of the addresses posted to newsgroups received spam.”</li></ul>Based on the findings in this report, my trick of masking e-mail addresses on my web sites should definitely help prevent future harvesting of my addresses.