Byte by Bite

Spam comprises more than half of email in Europe

by Marv Dealy

In any event, the EC said that only Netherlands and Finland are making any progress in cracking down on spam and that two thirds is coming from outside the European Union, with the United States being the largest culprit, sending some 21.6 percent of the spam entering the twenty-five nations that make up the European Union. China is next, sending some 13.4 percent of the EU’s spam total, while France accounts for 6.3 percent.

The AP story says that the Dutch have had the most success, reducing spam by eighty-five percent by fining businesses that send spam, including $78,500 in fines to three companies late last year. The EU is planning new legislation that will make it easier to prosecute spammers, and I think some of our politicians need to travel there right away – that’s right, a junket – and study the way the Dutch are handling the matter and bring back some fresh new laws of our own to cut down on spam.

In any event, you’ll still want to have some spam protection associated with your email. I use Thunderbird for my email, in part because it has excellent spam filtering. Version 1.5, currently available as a Friday freebie from the folks at Mozilla.com, saves me a lot of time in taking the spam out of the email inbox that manages to get through Network Solutions, who serves our email.

We used to serve our own email, having made the necessary investment in equipment and software, and were quite happy with the setup until to our horror we got onto a “these guys are email spammers” database list. This presented no end of problems as emails we sent to clients such as Hewlett Packard were bouncing back because of a bogus listing affixing us with the scarlet “d” of a dynamic IP address and branding us a spammer for using such an address.

We couldn’t get a resolution quickly, and because we must communicate with clients by email efficiently we switched our email service to Network Solutions (NetworkSolutions.com), one of the older domain name registrars, web hosting and email hosting providers. Our email problems seemed to settle down until recently we began getting error messages again, saying that emails we were trying to send to folks with an @hp.com address were not being sent or being delayed or in some other way being monkeyed with because we were on a spam database list again.

In a conference call with our lead HP contact, I spoke with an HP person in Costa Rica who steered us through the process of appealing to the particular database that HP was honoring to get our listing corrected – it turns out it was showing a non-existant dynamic IP address and the database listing was over a year old. There was a second listing in the database that HP and other companies rely on to bock known spammers that lead to a broken link, a second error in the database that was having an adverse effect on our business life and on my general state of indigestion.

A call to Network Solutions revealed that they were also part of the problem, which we hope will be fixed quickly, as having some emails not travel back and forth is maddening. Plus, how do you know when you’ve missed an email?

You thirty nine regular readers (is it a good diet that makes for a regular reader?) will recollect that I continue to tilt – apparently endlessly – with the Telephone Company in the hopes that they can someday get a working broadband signal into our Big Oak Flat office. Efforts have spanned four years, one T1 and two DSL lines, with an odd satellite thrown in. None of the efforts of the many wonderful, skilled people that actually show up at our office was ever able to get the very expensive T1 to work, so after fifteen months we pulled it and replaced it with two DSL lines (an extra in case one went out while we’re in the middle of something).

While we’re not in the business of being a web hosting company, we do host our own website Throck.com as well as a few for select clients. To host a website you have to have a broadband connection that comes with a static IP address. As of this writing, the one of our two DSLs which hosts our websites hasn’t dropped in nearly two days, an apparent record. I have an offer from one website customer who tells me that as a former phone company employee she would be happy to help me talk to the PUC about this problem. Stand by for news.

Too Much Internet

A report to be released by the University of Southern California will highlight that twenty one percent of adults think their children spend too much time on the Internet, up from eleven percent who said the same thing in 2000.

Of course, that’s small compared to the forty nine percent who say their kids watch too much TV. To all these parents I have one question: what part of turning the dang thing off don’t you understand? Throw the kids outside. Use Nancy Regan’s approach – Just say no.

Read more about the study in an AP story at CNN.com (http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/11/29/internet.use.ap/index.html).

Friday Freebie

Today’s freebie doesn’t have to be downloaded, it’s just a hint about using the mouse on your Windows computer.

In all likelihood you’ve struggled to get the mouse to point to just the right spot to use the Minimize, Restore and Close tools in the upper right corner of all Windows programs. Did you know that you can get the same effect as the minimize one by just double left clicking anywhere in the blue bar at the very top of the screen? Try it, much easier to hit.

Also, when you print a document if you are on a network with multiple printers you will sometimes need to change which printer you are going to use. There is a selection menu in all programs to enable you to select the printer. Rather than using the scroll bar on the right of these selection menus to move through a list of printers, just click anywhere in the window displaying a printer name and the rest of the list will pop up. There now, you didn’t even have to download anything. Go outside and play.