spam numbers and spammers

daily spam

Number of spam mails received on @cobbaut.be. From less than 1000/day in 2008 to +2000/day last month. Luckily Thunderbird puts 99.6 percent of those in the Junk folder.

2008
Oct : 25252
Nov : 28153
Dec : 31573

2009
Jan : 38451
Feb : 33050
Mar : 36850
Apr : 50240
May : 68329

having a .be domain
Now before you say Thunderbird cannot be that good, let me explain my old anti-spam system. With every registration on a website, I used a unique address in the @cobbaut.be domain. This unique name contains where(website), when(date) and reason for giving an email address (usually no_spam_please). All these addresses are easily recognized by Thunderbird and manually added to the Junk filter upon receiving the first spam.

data mining the spam
- Two months ago zattevrienden.be started spamming the 1998 advalvas registration.
- About 8000 monthly spams are sent to my public 2006 slashdot address
- 33072 spams were sent to an address I used once to play a stupid flashbased online game (I played it once!)
- 15163 spams sent to an address used to communicate with one single person only!
- 16751 spams sent to my old usenet registration
- ... let me know if you want me to run grep on my spam collection

gmail solution
Gmail has the excellent feature that lets people mark a mail as spam and takes this 'mark' into account when filtering any Inbox.

For example today vroom.be sent out spam: "Je ontvangt deze mail omdat je tijdens jouw registratie hebt aangegeven op de hoogte te willen worden gehouden door geselecteerde partners van Vroom.be." Utter bullshit of course since I have never been to that website. Thanks to other people marking this as spam, the mail was sent directly to the spam folder!
(no i'm not archiving gmail spam)

yum and aptitude behind proxy

I was at a client yesterday setting up vmware server on Fedora 8 and on Ubuntu 7.10. Both machines were behind a proxy, so no direct connection to port 80.

Yum on Fedora just hangs if you type yum update. Whereas aptitude update informs you that it cannot connect to servers.

Someone said to set $HTTP_PROXY, and that worked on the Fedora, but not Ubuntu. So i googled and saw $http_proxy which is the correct variable on Ubuntu...and only then i remembered that i just read this solution last week.

GMail blocks 'executables' ;-)

Sometimes i want a quick backup solution... so i sent "backup.tgz" to my gmail account. But gmail blocked it ??!!

From the GMail help pages:
"As a security measure to prevent potential viruses, Gmail doesn't allow you to send or receive executable files (such as files ending in .exe) that could contain damaging executable code.

Gmail won't accept these types of files even if they are sent in a zipped (.zip, .tar, .tgz, .taz, .z, .gz) format. If this type of message is sent to your Gmail account, it is bounced back to the sender automatically."

Funny thing is, my backup.tgz file did not contain any executables...only some files ending in .cmd !

Solution: Rename the backup.tgz file, problem solved!

hilarious easter egg

Google Maps, ask for directions from some place in the US to London. Look at direction number 19.



Thanks to Wouter at the party.

emotie

moe

Hah, is vermoeidheid wel een emotie ? Heel de week vroeg uit bed, veel in de file gestaan, lesgegeven aan twaalf studenten in een warme droge muffe ruimte met veertien draaiende computers. En plus c'etait en Francais, met de eerste avond een Veebeeke die zeven keer vraagt om te wandelen ;-) om vervolgens thuis dezelfde blik en verwachting in Wolfke te zien...de volgende avond een "internet voor iedereen" computer getroubleshoot, deze nacht slecht geslapen (te warm ?)... swat, ondergetekende is een beetje moe.


Que sera mi vida

De Gibson Brothers vroegen het zich 27 jaar geleden al af, ondergetekende passeerde er tijdens de Wolf Walk. Meer van hetzelfde waarschijnlijk ;-) AI (das-nie-subtiel) reageren sommigen nogal formeel op smileys... als ze moe zijn :-P


paraskavedekatriaphobia

Tiens tiens tiens, elfs twaalfs dertiens...het is vrijdag den dertiende, en niemand die er iets over heeft gezegd. Zou het bijgeloof dan toch afnemen ? Nah. Het is vakantie, er was geen file, de zon scheen... Als er op de volgende vrijdag den dertiende een ongeval is, dan is dat bijgeloof daar direct terug.


Inge Vervotte...

...wordt premier. Zeg niet dat ik u niet gewaarschuwd heb hee ;-)


cheers,
paul

Google My Maps

Found a nice new feature from Google Maps...called Google My Maps. It allows you to create custom drawings with descriptions on Google Maps.

26 february 1970

I wonder how far back the gmail calendar application will go...it went to my birthday without a problem! Yeay, i can use it as a reference for every day of my entire life...now all i have to do is fill in the blanks between 1970 and this year ;-)

It is nice of google to give us all these free (as in beer) applications. I wish they would make them free as in speech! Anyway, i enjoy the gmail, gcalendar, gchat(or whatever the name is) and the free spreadsheet! But i'm sure there's a good businessplan behind all that free stuff, cause clearly the google guys are smart people that know how to build an image, and how to run a business.