I’ve finally learned how to get Thunderbird to ban a whole site: highlight a piece of spam in the inbox, go to “message/create filter from message”, choose not ‘is’, but ‘contains’, and get rid of everything but the part after the @.
Unfortunately if your e-mail is being hosted by a site that has sent me spam, you may find I am not getting your e-mails. Thus far I am not getting it from ordinary sites: these guys are mostly evident by sitenames containing ‘click’ and whatnot. Right now I am getting about 800 spams a day, and have just signed up with Spamcop. This should help. I’ll at least be getting the satisfaction of reporting these people to someone who can cause them trouble.
The one thing that I get are the calls with no one there. I give those two “hellos” in case it’s someone who got interrupted just as I got the phone, but normally it’s just dead air and I hang up. I have no idea who they are, or what the point of the calls are, but it’s not a big deal to me.
The ones I really love are the voice mails from collection agencies, trying to get hold of someone who doesn’t live at my place, that start off with “If you fail to respond to this call, Mr. Smith, we will assume that we have reached the right person.” These put me in a quandary, because I have no intention of calling someone to say that I have no clue who Mr. Smith is, but I will also feel bad if that is a legitimate call and Mr. Smith finds himself in some sort of trouble because they assume he got the message and he didn’t.
I’ve encountered the “no one there” calls as well. Those are from robodialers, where machines dial a dozen numbers at once, and whichever line gets answered first by a warm body gets shunted to a salesperson. If you don’t answer within the first couple of rings, the robot assumes no one is home, and drops the call, leaving you with dead air. it cuts down on the phone banks having to pay extra people, since one person can monitor a couple dozen phone lines at once.
Those collection calls are a known scam, targeting mostly the elderly, who will sometimes pay for fear of violence or economic ruin. They’re one of the foulest of the lot.
For the record, CC’s computer guru, Lynn, has now got onto the spam problem through my personal account, and has shut the pipeline down nearly cold. Now if only she could do the same for BP…
I’m pretty good with improbable, halfway decent with impossible, but completely worthless with miracles—although, when last I looked, the multi-ton cap was holding. Now, if only the dratted goo doesn’t start seeping out the sides.
Since you brought up the subject of Bastille Day, I was thinking of the line that has been attributed to Marie Antoinette, “Then let them eat cake.” From what I read, Marie wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but then neither was Louis XVI. When she was told the people of Paris had no bread, it wasn’t cruelty that sparked her remark, it was the fact that if there isn’t bread, maybe there’s cake and we can give that to them.
Who knows, as the events of 217 years ago are all speculative. I’d hate to have lived in Paris during that time, especially as a member of the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy. I would have equated it with living in Salem, MA during the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
I also just received a spam email from myself offering sex pills. I’m not sure what sex pills are for, whether it’s to take the place of real sex, change my sex, or what. I’m more concerned with why this happened and can’t find anything on my ISP’s email instructions that covers this. Time to start changing things around, I guess.
Just from what I have read, the line that is often stated as “let them eat cake” may have actually been “let them eat crumbs”, since apparently the word for crumb in French may also mean something like “little cake”. Which is also not going to mollify your hungry public, but I find “alternative translations” interesting.
I had relatives in Salem at the start of the witch trials. For whatever reason, husband and wife started walking down the road toward the Carolinas, and never came back to Salem.
Of course, maybe they were witches~
Or just saw where this was going and decided the Carolinas might be far enough. Puritanism did not persist in that family into the next generation.
As for the sex pills, maybe it’s like the brand in Barbarella…
Proge figured out the correct way to deal with ‘missionaries”. He looks them right in the eyes and says, “We are apostate.” They back up with looks that identify us as in league with the devil. We have not had any visits in years.
😆 my method of dealing with juvvie prank callers…I hold my hand partly over the receiver and say in my best male voice: “That’s all right, officer. I think we’ve got this call traced, now…”
My best result: the phone rings again, and it’s a chorus of very young voices saying, in unison: “We’re sorry!”
http://www.eff.org/wp/effs-top-12-ways-protect-your-online-privacy
History is written by the victors, and the survivors. It’s quite possible, imho, for a courtier who was looking to save his/her own neck, might have lied to the insurrectionists and put those words in the queen’s mouth. We’ll never know, since there was nobody to question the veracity of the remark.
Xenophon, thanks for the link.
I read somewhere that the word she used was “brioche,” but that was years and years ago, so I don’t remember where I saw it.
If a spambot gets ahold of someone’s email address or their address book, then they can send to — or as if from — any email address they access therein. Therefore, it’s possible to receive spam as if from oneself. However, from what I understand (I’m not a guru) the email’s header includes info on the sender, pathway, and receiver, such that an expert can discover that such spams are fakes.
Glad your email is clearer now.
Whether brioche, cake, or crumbs, Marie Antoinette either (1) did not understand the plight of her subjects, the people, or (2) was such a klutz at public relations that she failed to anticipate how such a statement would be perceived by the public, even if she had the best intentions, and actually meant that something should be provided for them. Yes, perhaps some courtier capitalized on spinning the story to his/her own ends. But as far as we know, the queen said something approximating, “Let them eat cake.” (Now I’m curious. It’s been too many years, and I don’t recall reading the account itself in the native French.) — But yes, that very court had gilded furnishings of all kinds. It doesn’t excuse the barbarities of Mme La Guillotine, but if you get enough people truly in unbearable circumstances and righteously (or unrighteously) and passionately enraged…Mme Lafarge in A Tale of Two Cities was not at all far from the truth of the reaction all throughout France by the ordinary people.
Then again, perhaps “le pain” and “la peine” do have an ironic homophonous similarity.
Meh… no, not sure why I felt compelled to digress and rant. Excusez-moi, tout le monde.
(Reminds self to look up typing accents on an iPhone.)
Best coverage of the revolution et all comes from Mark Steel in Viva La Revolution. A clip of part of it can be found lurking on Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHsdGdrAPWw&feature=related – and the book is darn good as well.
Regarding Marie Antoinette and “let them eat cake:” According to Wikipedia (and some other sites) there’s no evidence she ever said it. And it also appeared in a book written a couple of years before she came to France. One site attributes it to the wife of Louis XIV (many years earlier).
Regarding spam: Ack. 800 a day is terrible.
Hi —
I don’t know if you’ve tried this yet or not, but I’ve had really good luck with a bit of advice regarding spam and how I put my email online.
I was told to always break up my email addy, so that if a internet robot reads and collects it — along with probably several thousand others — it won’t work. Basically, I put:
resachallender at yahoo.com
As an example, not the contact info I have at the bottom of my main menu:
http://www.resafantasyarts.com/yetuntitled.html
If it’s a living, breathing person reading that, they can make the leap to fix it. A robot can’t. And so, very much less spam.
Best wishes,
Resa
ARgh.
That was supposed to be “note the contact” not “not the contact”
I need coffee.
Lol! Thanks!
My solution (dreamt up many, many years ago) is still going strong. Unfortunately it wouldn’t work for someone as popular as CJ – you have to be an anti-social loner like me really 🙂
The way I did it was to buy my own domain then have everything forwarded to a catch-all account. So far so bad – most admins scream when they hear ‘catch-all’. But here’s the kicker – everyone gets given a unique address to contact me. That means when I get spam I know exactly who’s responsible. I can add that address to a blacklist and optional yell at them or their ISP.
I get almost no spam. Ever. Maybe once or twice a year but I just blacklist that address and I get no more from there. The one that annoyed me most was Avast. Of all the companies to leak my address and/or sell it that has to be the worst.
Anyway for those of you without your own domain you can often do something similar. Most email servers ignore anything that appears after ‘+’ in the address so you can use that.
If your email is ‘wibble@wibbly.woo.com’ then ‘wibble+amazon@wibbly.woo.com’ ought to reach you as well. If you get spam addressed to the latter you know why. The chances that a spammer would guess that address is very low. It’s also the one aspect of email no-one can fake. They can put all sorts of rubbish in the header (pretending to be anyone) but a faked ‘RCPT TO’ command has to be correct 🙂