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Thread: Lazy

  1. #1
    Alex Lancaster
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    Smile Lazy

    For lazy types, (like me) Why donīt You put the "Main Forums" button on the home page, right below "home", would save one scroll and one click.

    Alex.

  2. #2
    Super Moderator Hofmannhp's Avatar
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    Re: Lazy

    Originally posted by Alex Lancaster
    For lazy types, (like me) Why donīt You put the "Main Forums" button on the home page, right below "home", would save one scroll and one click.
    Alex.
    Hi lazy Alex,

    I also stumbled over this.....but easily set a link to the browser "favorites", so I do one click and are here.

    HP
    Please help us save more info about the vintage systems. Let us register your speakers and drivers.

  3. #3
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    One can create a top row button in Netscape/Mozilla linked to

    http://www.audioheritage.org/vbulletin

    and if you are not using Netscape/Mozilla the following article is worth a read

    http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14419

    John
    Last edited by John Nebel; 05-25-2004 at 10:34 AM.

  4. #4
    Administrator Mr. Widget's Avatar
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    I use Mozilla based Netscape 7.1 and have been very satisfied. I am still training the spam feature... but spam is spam.

    Widget

  5. #5
    Alex Lancaster
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    Smile

    Thanks, Don Mc helped me to direct-access it.

  6. #6
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    Hi Widget!

    One potentially helpful bit on spam and this was a big discovery for me - spammers can't get your e-mail address by magic - one has to give it to them.

    It doesn't take too much care to keep it private.

    I changed my e-mail address from [email protected] which it had been since early Internet days to [email protected] after the painful step of going through everything I'd signed up for and changing the registration, and spam dropped to zero.

    OK, I wasn't as stupid as a brick because that old e-mail address was not the real one, but one meant to be given out. I just hadn't realized how widely it would be circulated and that it would be rendered effectively useless.

    A required ID for every mail server is "postmaster" - you can guess how many of those IDs are now directed to oblivion and the same with the universal Unix ID "root", although with root one has to be careful to allow system messages through.

    I think I'll put in virtusertable entries for lastname and firstname.lastname to see if any spam bot is looking at vBulletin

    John
    Last edited by John Nebel; 05-25-2004 at 06:14 PM.

  7. #7
    Senior Seņor boputnam's Avatar
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    Originally posted by John Nebel
    I changed my e-mail address from [email protected] ... to [email protected] and spam dropped to zero.
    Well, bricks are my friends, and that reference to them was, well - oh, sorry, wrong Thread...

    But, why does the puntuation between given and surnames stump the spammers? Or, am I not understanding something intuitively obvious to more casual observers...??
    bo

    "Indeed, not!!"

  8. #8
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    Originally posted by boputnam
    Why does the puntuation between given and surnames stump the spammers? Or, am I not understanding something intuitively obvious to more casual observers...??
    Bo,

    Sorry for not being very clear. It's wasn't the punctuation, just the change. Spammers have my old address and it is unusable now. I'm careful with the new one and that really makes a surprising difference. Any change to the address would be fine, except for common names which are susceptible to blind attempts - [email protected] would be a bad choice. Spammer's "code" in a blindly-sent html e-mail would then verify through the spammers web server log file that the e-mail was opened in a browser and therefore the address was good. You can often see this code if you display the source in an html spam e-mail, but then it's too late, you've been had.

    Additionally, some ISPs must have rotten security - a test ID I set up on Yahoo immediately started attracting spam.

    We use Berkeley sendmail on Unix and have set the following:

    # privacy flags
    O PrivacyOptions=goaway

    which means that a program can't go through a list of common names interrogating the server on each to see if it were a valid address.

    An e-mail address on a web site is a great target. Poor Don.

    John
    Last edited by John Nebel; 05-25-2004 at 06:17 PM.

  9. #9
    Administrator Mr. Widget's Avatar
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    Then there are the ISPs that sell your e-mail address. I have a DSL account with SBC. They sold my "primary" e-mail address. It gets about 80 spam messages a day and I don't even use it. The address I do use never used to get any and is currently getting about 4 a day. Not too bad, but it is bound to grow from there.

    Widget

  10. #10
    Senior Seņor boputnam's Avatar
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    Originally posted by John Nebel
    It's wasn't the punctuation, just the change.
    Well, dang-it, that's exactly what I thought. I was hopeful, though...

    Thanks, John...

    Signed,

    Jethro Tull
    Last edited by boputnam; 05-25-2004 at 01:43 PM.
    bo

    "Indeed, not!!"

  11. #11
    Webmaster Don McRitchie's Avatar
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    An e-mail address on a web site is a great target. Poor Don.
    Got that right. At the moment, there are three levels of spam filters set on [email protected]. John has one set at his end so that only emails explicitly addressed to "lansing" are forwarded. My ISP has a black box spam filter. It's a black box because the rules it uses are kept secret from me, but it seems to ferret out about 80% of the spam. I have also engaged the junk email filter on Outlook and it catches another 10%.

    Overall, I get around 100 spam emails per day and the filters move around 90% of this to "junk" folders. Quite honestly, I no longer have the time to inspect each entry to confirm that it truly is junk before it is automatically deleted. Not to mention that doing so pretty much defeats the purpose of using a spam filter. The few times I have checked has indicated that the filters seem to be around 99.9% effective.

    This is a long winded way of saying that there will be times that the spam filters will wrongly identify legitimate email as spam. Therefore, if you are waiting for a reply from me for any length of time, there is a chance that your original email never made it past the spam filters.

    On a separate note, one of the most common emails I get to [email protected] has to do with newly registered members of our forum being unable to log in. This is almost always due to the sender's spam filters blocking the automated emails from our forum. Just about all of the big names in email are guaranteed to block automated emails as spam. Therefore, anyone registering from an AOL, MSN, Yahoo or Hotmail address will likely experience this.
    Regards

    Don McRitchie

  12. #12
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    Originally posted by Mr. Widget
    Then there are the ISPs that sell your e-mail address.
    Didn't think of that. It would leave one pretty defenseless.

    John
    Last edited by John Nebel; 05-25-2004 at 07:35 PM.

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