Got spam?

A number of people I've talked to have noticed that their SPAM volume has increased over the last month to 6 weeks. We aren't sure if it's due to the recent Spamhaus legal activity, or just a natural increase in traffic. But frankly, I'm sick of it. Better than 80% of my incoming messages are SPAM now. I've had to redirect our family domain's catchall address to my GMail account, but that hasn't helped much, as I am getting a lot of junk to legitimate addressed too.

We don't have SpamAssassin on our mail host, but I've been thinking about asking whether it can be installed.

I wish it was easier to apply simple filtering rules, but that really requires that senders take extra steps. Things like GPG-signing or encrypting messages would go a long way. SPAMmers won't take the time (or may not even be able to) GPG-sign messages, so if everyone signed legit email, we could just filter anything that isn't signed. This would be a huge anti-phishing advantage for financial institutions as well - if it's not signed, they didn't send it, so don't click anything. I'd gladly give my banks my public key so they can send me 100% encrypted email, to make things that much more secure. I know that financial institutions know about GPG/PGP, as I know of several which use the technology to securely send system-generated email for transaction data. Getting that message through to Customer Service, however, is a chore.

Alas, I seem to know at most 4 people who understand and would actually apply GPG measures on their email. It's not terribly difficult to understand, really. And there are tools out there like Windows Privacy Tools to help make working with it easier.

Format change

Lately I've been trying to download our Verizon Wireless call data on a monthly basis and get it into an Access database to do some reporting - mostly so that we can take the appropriate tax deductions for our use of our phones for work purposes. My wife more or less is required to have a cell phone by her employer, and she gets a monthly reimbursement, but I think we may be able to claim some of the difference between her reimbursement and the monthly bill on our taxes as well.

Anyway, I logged into the Verizon Wireless site this morning to pull our latest billing cycle data, and they've gone and changed the format of the CSV downloads that they offer. This, of course, requires a change on my part so that I can keep using the data.

Why do they insist upon doing this? They aren't providing any different data, they've just changed the data structure and presentation. No longer is "PM" used - it's "P", which breaks my date/time parsing. Phone number are no longer (123)456-7890, they're 123-456-7890.

Are they doing this to foil screen-scrapers and other automatic downloaders? Or is it because they don't think people are trying to use the data, thus they can change it at will?

IE funkiness

I discovered something funky with Internet Explorer 6 a couple weeks ago. As I've noted here before, I'm wriging my documenation for my project at work in HTML wherever I can. I printed my full spec document out, and found something really weird that I'd never seen before.

I set a text-indent on paragraphs for readbility and style, via CSS. Everything looks great on screen. When I printed the document, I found that for any paragraph that spanned a page break, IE indented the text of the paragraph's first line on the second page!

It's not a huge deal, but I found it curious. I haven't tested with IE7 yet (IE7 isn't allowed at work, and I don't want to mess with my system at home), nor have I been able to chase down reports of this behavior elsewhere online.

Bug, or proper behavior per the W3C spec?