I’ve noticed something a little odd in the spam I’ve been getting lately. The message begins “Hello! I’m bored tonight. I am nice girl that would like to chat…”. So far so, uh, bad — nothing unusual in that. The odd thing is that with virtually all of these messages, the name of the sender […]

Even the big boys sometimes shoot themselves in the foot. Something Shawn Casey is doing is hurting his email deliverability and probably his response rates, and while I know why he’s doing it, there is a better way…
Hi Shawn,
I tried to get this message to you through your help desk, but I got the impression […]

After my transition from Mail.app to Thunderbird today, I discovered that quite a few messages that I had deleted long ago in Mail.app had reappeared in Thunderbird. Here’s my theory of how it happened and how people using Mail.app can be sure that they’re not wasting a lot of hard drive space on deleted messages.
Mail.app […]

Yesterday, I heard that version 2.0 of the Thunderbird email client had been released, so I decided to check it out. I would have switched a while back except for one annoying problem — I prefer the two-paned view with a separate window for reading messages, which works great in Thunderbird except that when I […]

I recently signed up for a test drive of BidFuel.com (which I cancelled during the free period–it didn’t look useful enough). Since then, I’ve started receiving spam at the email address I gave them–an email address I created uniquely for them. No one else has ever seen that email address. I recommend not signing up […]

Yesterday, in response to an article by Marc Orchant that I read in More Space: Nine Antidotes to Complacency in Business, I overhauled my email filing structure. Most of the old structure is still there (maybe when I get a faster computer, I’ll be satisfied to use search tools rather than filing to find messages, […]

I had the idea yesterday that a standardized protocol could be created the enable email clients to interact with whitelist-based SPAM blocking software. Given the complexity of identifying SPAM by textual analysis, whitelist-based SPAM protection appears to be getting more popular. I plan to start using it myself with some of my email addresses in […]

AOL and Yahoo! are implementing a new system which will guarantee a free ride past their spam filters for senders who pay something in the neighborhood of a penny for each email they send. As long as they don’t alter their spam filters in ways that generate more false positives to try to force people […]

Ugh! Not this again! Tim Bray appears to be in favor of a scheme for reducing spam by having people pay a little bit for each bit of content they send or post tthat they want getting past the spam filters of the future. ongoing - Internet Stamps. Since such a system would require some […]

With all the efforts we go through to stop spam and to convince people not to respond to it, the fact that we still get so much proves that it must be working for somebody. Why does it work, and how can we try to stop it?
Even though only a tiny, tiny percentage of unsolicited […]