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Ubuntu – Day 4

I’m going to do a short written update to my Ubuntu trek, but record my first official “Shotgun Podcast” here shortly.

After only three days, I gave up on Evolution email as my email program. I like the program a lot, but unfortunately, I get way too much spam not to have a better anti-spam solution. So, I downloaded and installed Thunderbird today which while not perfect and far from my Cloudmark Desktop solution on my Windows machine, it is much better than the Evolution method.

Ubuntu – Day 1

I haven’t touched my Windows’ machine all day and won’t for the next 14. However, one program I already miss from my Windows’ computer is my wonderful anti-spam software called Cloudmark Desktop. Adam and I talk almost weekly about Cloudmark Desktop. We have both used it since we discovered it at the old Comdex computer show five or six years ago. Currently, they don’t have a Linux version of the software and don’t plan on it anytime soon. The Evolution program that comes with Ubuntu works very well, and I will test its anti-spam solution that is built-in and learn to tweak it over the next two weeks.

If anyone reading this knows of a fast, accurate anti-spam software for Evolution in Ubuntu, please let me know.

Rick’s 3 Rules of Email

  1. Never Forward Email
  2. Never Forward Email
  3. IF you must forward email, ALWAYS use Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) and ALWAYS clean up the header information from previous email.

Some computer users who encounter my rules of email sometimes pass off my thoughts as being too strict. Unfortunately, I know it isn't true. Today, for the upteenth time, I worked with a customer who has had her email address for less than a year and already is inundated with more than 75 spam per day. Luckily her Internet provider has a decent spam filter, but she still has to put up with a lot of unwanted spam. The only thing she uses the email address for is correspondence with some family, friends, and two religious oriented weekly email newsletters.

Back to work

I just got back in town a few hours ago. I have been returning calls and sifting through emails. One of the drawbacks to technology is that it makes it easier for work to stack up while you are gone.

I must, again, say how grateful I am for Cloudmark Desktop, an email spam filter that actually works. I had over 300 emails while I was gone, but only about 20 were actually worth reading. Cloudmark sifted all of the spam and none of the good stuff.

I can't figure out why more Internet service providers don't use Cloudmark to filter spam (Do you hear me ACS, Bresnan, AOL and every other ISP that uses a crappy filter that prevents the good stuff from getting through on a regular basis? I didn't think so.).

Dial-up users: Are you tired of waiting for email with large attachments?

I have been utilizing this tip much more lately as dial-up users get pummeled with email containing pictures that haven't been resized and an endless parade of forward spam with large attachments from friends and family with high speed connections. For every one megabyte of space an attachment contains, it takes 5-8 minutes for a dial-up user to download it. Many joke emails, slide shows or movies being passed around today can be 5mb or larger…tying up the dial-up users phone line for an hour or more!  If you don't want to tell the offending parties to take you off their list, you can do one or both of the following procedures to gain some control over you email again.

Captcha?

Captcha1Technology has spawned many strange new words from blog to podcast to spyware. Captcha is a new term that you will be seeing more of in the coming months. In fact, chances are good that you have already dealt with captchas. A captcha is a scrambled mess of characters (like the ones pictured in this article) that we have to reproduce in a box before submitting a web form.

The purpose of captchas is to thwart bad guys from releasing programs (web bots) that can automatically fill out forms all over the web. They do this to leave spam on sites that allow comments or to send bogus orders to e-commerce sites. Captchas work well at stopping these hacker bots because they can't 'read' and verify these characters.

Splogs?

Spam. It's not just for email anymore.

I often get the question of why people send spam. Money is the simple answer. As spam fighting software slowly matures and gets better and email users slowly (how dense or desperate can some people be) stop buying stuff from spam, the purveyors of spam look elsewhere. One profitable place they have utilized lately is blog's comments. Many web sites (including ours) encourage readers to leave comments. Spammers figured out a way to program Internet bots to automatically find these types of sites and pummel them with 'comment spam'. They leave links to all kinds of sites from porn to real estate and sell everything from Viagra to cell phone batteries. Again, some crazy people actually click on these links and buy the products or services. Cha-ching!

Even newer than comment spam is a phenomenon known as splogs. These are sites that pose as real sites, but are nothing more than a site full of links to other sites or more splogs. The sole purpose of these types of sites is to generate revenue. You may have run across one of these sites and not even known it. After doing a search, you click a resulting link and end up on a page full of advertising and links to sites with the topic you searched for but no actual information on the topic…that's a splog.

We can all combat spam in any of its forms by never clicking the links and for sure never buying the products or services they sell. It will never disappear, but we can slow it down and make it less profitable for these mud-dwellers.

New ways to get more junk email

My comments today are directed toward those who are looking for more ways to get on junk email lists. Some common ways that we talk about on the show include the following:

  • Register any new project you buy.
  • Ask your friends to add you to their forwarded joke list (spammers love to harvest from forwarded email).
  • Reply to junk email asking that the sender take you off their list (spammers interpret this as "Thank you for the junk mail, I just wanted you to know that this is a valid address and I read anything you send me).
  • Post your email address all over Internet forums, web pages and other public Internet sites.

Now, there are some new ways or variations of the old ways to get added to junk mail lists, give these a try if you want more spam:

Why you shouldn’t use the same username and password for everything

I have had several clients tell me that they use the same username and password for everything so they don't forget.

While this is a personal decision, I just thought I would provide one good reason why it's not a good idea to only use one username and password.

Let's say that somehow a bad guy gets a job working for your ISP (Internet Service Provider) or perhaps he gets a job working for your newsletter about singles who collect stamps.

Typically these kinds of sites can't see your password, but they can reset your password. If this particular shady individual resets your password then you won't be able to get into the stuff related to that site that you want.

The no porn approach to computer maintenance

There are many things that can slow a computer down, but nothing does more to negatively impact the performance of a computer more than spyware. Even many viruses run undetected, but almost all spyware prevents a system from running at top speed.

Spyware comes from a variety of places, but there are three types of web browsing that will guarantee that you accumulate some of the worst forms of spyware.

Online gambling sites: Not all online gambling sites are sources of spyware, but most of them are.

Online surveys and drawings via popups and spams: Many legitimate companies ask for your opinion through surveys, but surveys can also be lures for spyware. If you get a popup or spam offering a free iPod, laptop, ringtone, etc., consider it a trick to get you to download spyware.