Archive for March 1st, 2007

Free solution to eliminate spam

By
Andy
 – March 1, 2007Posted in: Email & Spam

One of the disadvantages of being a Web Developer / Sys Admin is that my email address is published on a lot of our websites. As we have over 4000 domains this means that I end getting quite a lot of spam!

Last week I had a few days off and when I got back on day four to check my email, I had about 3500 emails, most of which had to be spam. Outlook’s spam filter took care of about half and the few rules I’ve set for common, easily identified spam got rid of about a third of the rest. This still left me with over 1000 messages to sort through. Annoying…

After I’d done this I decided to take a two-pronged approach to making sure this didn’t happen again. First, I went to all our major sites and replaced every email address I could find on them with a peice of JavaScript that uses

document.write()

within a function to write the email address after the page loads. This should stop our email addresses from ending up on any more spam lists.

The next step was to take all the catch-all email accounts we have and instead of forwarding them all to my real email addresses, forward them to the best FREE Spam Filter in the world, Gmail. This allows me to run them through Gmail’s spam filter and then forward them on again to my real email account. Genius.

This second change means that I’ve gone from 200 spam messages getting into my Inbox every day to about a dozen. Perfick!

Read the Vista Home EULA!

By
Andy
 – March 1, 2007Posted in: Windows

Just in case you were planning on getting a copy of Vista Home and you upgrade your own PC every now and again, beware and read the EULA…

Microsoft have now decided to make a few changes in EULA (which no-one reads) and hope no-one will notice (which we won’t until it’s too late) which means that if you buy a brand spanking new PC with an EOM version of Vista on it, you can only transfer the licience for that copy of Windows to another PC only once.

This might not seem like a problem at first glance but there are a couple of points to remember:

  • Hardware upgrades will cause a New Machine event
  • Windows Activation is now mandatory

The firat point is most important for those who upgrade a lot as a year down the line, swapping out the hard disk and adding more RAM could be enough to cause a New Machine point. A year later you might want to replace the MOBO and CPU and this might trigger another event but due to the terms of the EULA, means your copy of Windows is now invalid. And knowing Microsoft, Vista might lock you out at this point…

The second point will only affect those who are trying to use Vista legally but have been caught by the point above. It’s not a major issue but for those who are caught and decide to stick it out, it’ll be harder to keep your machine running. Even if windows doesn’t lock you out, since you are now in breach of the EULA, chances are that the daily Windows Activation thingy they’ve introduced will prevent you from getting all the security fixes that will (inevitibly) be coming out.

Watch yourselves gamers!