At the beginning of last week, Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and the Editor-in-Chief of Wired, announced that he was permanently blocking the email addresses of PR people who had sent him inappropriate email and published a list of those addresses. The post garnered a lot of attention, and a couple of days later (Nov. 1) he posted a followup: PR Blockage: The Aftermath. Definitely worth a read if you have any involvement with media relations.
New kind of spam
Just now I got my first instance of what I think is a new form of spam – an email with an audio file payload. It was only about 175Kb all tolled and it was just as easy to delete as any other spam (i.e., very), but I was surprised to see it at all. Is this a widespread phenomenon? Who else receives these?
Facebook spammers?
Alec Saunders has passed along the news that there is concern in the Facebook developer forums that Facebook is being invaded by spammers. We’ll see – even more than Google, Facebook is vulnerable to bad behaviour of this kind.
A couple of weeks ago
I asked for advice on how to filter emails such that known spam was deleted immediately from the server, while keeping a record in case of false positives. I hoped to do this directly in Apple Mail, but based on my research I found this to be impossible.
So I’ve gone back to using Spamfire, a program from Matterform that does just what I need. I have used it for a while, but in the past few months I started having more and more problems with it – in particular, it seemed to corrupt the mail spool on the POP server I was using. I hope it works better this time around.
Little help!
I have an email problem that I can’t seem to solve. I use a couple of different email clients on a couple of different machines to check my POP email. I also get a lot of spam. My main machine, at home, runs Apple’s Mail.app and does a pretty good job at filtering it out. The problem is that when Mail identifies and removes a spam email from my Inbox, I would like it to delete the email from the server immediately, or at least on the following connection to the server. If it did so, then when I checked email remotely using my phone, only good emails would be left, saving hassle and bandwidth (my Treo bandwidth usage is metered).
I have asked about this in Apple’s Discussion Forums and at Ask MetaFilter, but no joy yet. Is there anyone who reads here who might be able to help?
