Monday, December 19, 2005

Browser Mute

So, how often have you been in your own little world, headphones clamped around your head pumping out some fine tunes via iTunes WHY and surfed onto some web page with some god awful sound effects loop or worse a page with content you actually want to read but some multimedia ad keeps asserting itself with some annoying chirp?

It happens to me all the time and leads me to this one question. Where is the 'mute' button on my browser?

Monday, December 12, 2005

Email address purity and Netiquette

As with many people who have been using the Internet for some time I have many, many email addresses; ISP pops, web mail etc as well as the addresses I maintain for the domain names I own. Some of the addresses I've had for many years and of these most I no longer use in earnest - often due to the shear volume of spam.
Many of these addresses are purpose specific - I have addresses for each band I run and for my 'record label' etc.

A couple of years ago I set up a new domain and associated email addresses (all of which I access via forwarding to Gmail) and knowing how SPAM works I have made every effort to maintain the purity of my in-box. This is something I had managed to do with some success until about a month ago. Now the trickle of SPAM has turned into a torrent and I can trace the event that triggered it.

One of the music promoters I have worked with had my private email address a while back as I was away from the net for a few days while we were finalising the details of a gig, and unlike my band email address, I can get my personal mail via a cell phone.
Then last month, horror of horrors it arrived - a gig listing mail out with about 100 email addresses IN THE CC FIELD!!!!!
Now thanks to a couple of compromised mail boxes by members on the list the SPAMMERS now have my purest of email addresses.

I don't really blame the promoter in question - BCC is often misunderstood, and the consequences of a large CC list are not really understood by e-mailers at large - but in the interest of all those who don't want to help the SPAMMERS I call on every one to spread the message - 'USE BCC'.
If ever there was a case for the value of netiquette this is it.

Fortunatly I find that Gmail's SPAM filter works very well, but the 'count' next to the SPAM folder link offends my eye and I can't not zero it at every session!