Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Spam is really starting to get nasty. My spam counts have increased from a few hundred a day, to several hundred, to now well over a thousand. My problem is a bit different than most people, as I am accepting all mail to xxxxx@lkessler.com. The new type of spam I am getting is that each spam send also includes multiple X-Copy’s to harry@lkessler.com, frederick@lkessler.com, and all sorts of other random names.

I decided a while ago not to bounce messages or spam back not because I question the effectiveness, but I figure the simplest thing is just to delete it and not tie up the www with returns that are 99% useless. It also simplifies my implementation of Mailwasher and makes it as efficient as possible. I like mailwasher as all that junk never gets onto my computer since it is processed right off the server. I’ve got all my filtering rules set up which work very well for me, and I find their new learning feature quite useful to help pick out any good e-mail that I might be inadvertantly caught by my filters. I do make sure that I look at any e-mail which have “Behold” anywhere in them (I have a filter for that), in case there is someone new trying to ask me something about the program.

But, as the number of spam increase, I have found Mailwasher to be taking a fair bit of time for processing. I sent this message to their forum about it, and maybe they’ll address the issue. Also, I know Myhosting.com, the provider I use, is working with other hosters and the Microsoft initiative to be able to validate e-mail sender IDs. They say this in the works and they will be setting up their new e-mail infrastructure later this summer. Maybe this will stop the type of spam that is plaguing me. It’s a horrible time waster.

In the meantime, I have a fairly routine way of handling it. I open mailwasher and click on the process messages button. While that’s working (about 3 messages a second, so it can take several minutes), I open up my e-mail and check my Newsgroups (mainly Richview). I pop back to mailwasher, quickly scan the processed e-mail to mark any unmarked spam or unmarked any marked good message and hit the delete spam button. The delete will take a few more minutes, so I have some other things I do during that time. Then I go back, do one last process to catch handle the few new mail that came in the last few minutes, and then I load them into Outlook Express and handle them. It’s a bit of a hassle, but it works. Yes, Spam is a plague I cannot get around because of my well publicized domain name: lkessler.com. I look forward to new solutions for spam.

After going through many RSS articles and searching the web, I came across myRSS which will scrape a webpage and set up an RSS feed for it. The basic service is free and I signed up to try it. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see how it handles these updates I’ve added today to my Blog before I can pass judgement on it.

Spent a couple of days looking into how to convert my blog into a feed. There are two types of formats: RSS and Atom. RSS is the original format and is supported by Yahoo, whereas Atom is the newer more powerful format, supported by Google. I could get a content management tool, like Blogger, to maintain my blog and produce my feed. But I really like my current setup and don’t want the hassles of switching. The alternative is to find a “scraper” tool, to convert my Html into XML in either RSS or Atom format. Well, all the scraper tools are either online tools or written in some scripting language (like PHP) which requires your own server to run on. The format is not too difficult. I could write my own one, but that would just deflect me away from my real goal of getting Behold out.