British Inside : Email, Spam, Telligenti, Technical

Now deleting spam

James — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:19:00 GMT

Until today I have been reviewing my gmail spam folder each day or so, and marking all new spam as read when I've reviewed it. Most of the time that works ok, but I've noticed that there are times when I get spam with a presumably deliberately wrong date - maybe a few years ago.

That's quite clever of them really, in a way, because it means that I don't see it in my first page of spam.

And it's pretty dumb of them in another way, because, well, I don't see it. Not making much money off viagra if no-one sees the email, guys!

In any case, typing in the "in:spam is:unread" to find them got too much for me today, so I switched over to a new method. Rather than marking as read, I now review spam and then hit the "delete forever" link.

As a little bonus, I get a "feel-good" message back from Google each time!

Thanks Google, you old kidder!

Few Google tips

James — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:04:00 GMT

As I find them..

Gmail: I've seen 20-30 good emails caught in spam, so check it often while you train it. Since I don't want to check the same message twice, I mark the spam as read whenever I check it.

Then, to check just the unread spam you can search for in:spam is:unread. Here's a list of other neat search terms.
Google Calendar: If like me you used the Month view, instead try the Custom view set to "Next 4 weeks". It's much better since you don't see all those "old weeks" and the days are bigger so you see more s+.
Adding the US Holidays was easy. Add > Add a public calendar. Here you see the family calendar!

I made a mistake many years ago..

James — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 21:15:00 GMT

..and I'm now paying for it big time.

I'm not the only one either - when I bought shawthing.com and started using that as my email address I decided to be smart and use the "nobody" (catch-all) address rather than setup lots of different accounts.

And then I used pretend email addresses that matched the site I was signing up at. So, at msdn.microsoft.com I registered as msdn@shawthing.com; at Google AdSense I used adsense@shawthing.com, etc.

Looking back now, I'm not quite sure why I did this. I think it had something to do with finding out which sites would share my email address without my permission. So, if I started getting spam to adsense@shawthing.com I could get on my high horse and call Google evil again.

What really happened though, wasn't that I caught web sites selling my email address. No, what happened is that spammers found that anything-they-bloody-well-wanted@shawthing.com worked as a valid email address.

So today I'm getting 2,000-3,000 spam a day that poor spambayes is trying hard to keep under control.

Ironically, very few are to my published email addresses. I estimate that 90% are either to or from a fake email address - which of course beause of the catch-all account I get in my Inbox. Every single one.

I admit that I was going to ask how to find my email addresses, perhaps using some Office API? But then I thought, let's keep is simple you pillock.

So, I started a simple search in Outlook and specified "In Folder" doesn't contain "spam", and "To" contains shawthing.com. And of course, it gave me a list! I just sorted on the To address and soon I will have made this problem my bitch.

Take that spammers. :)