I read the thread where a few people had e-mailed me in an attempt to talk shop.
It has been a while since I mentioned this but our e-mail reception is very poor. What typically happens is that when I arrive at the store in the morning for the ride, usually about 7:00 AM lately, I download the e-mails that came in over night. There are usually about 700-1000 e-mails, 99.9% spam- mortgages, African princes wanting to launder money, porn, bigger dick, etc, etc. I delete them all- everything, and start the day fresh. I used to sort through the senders or subject lines but it was taking a lot of time as you may imagine.
Then, as the day goes on, I’ll pull down the e-mail again. At this point in the day we typically get duplicates of everything we got overnight (the original 700-1000) plus the new ones, and they accumulate throughout the day until the whole thing melts down and we get a “POP 3 server error” message.
We’ve paid about $200 to netscape support, microsoft support, etc. to try to work it out, but at the moment it would seem the only answer may be a new e-mail address.
Come to think of it, I may just set up an account for you guys.
At any rate, sorry for the problems. You can always phone us also- tell 'em you’re a slowtwitcher when you call. They’ll understand.
Tom: do you want a gmail (google) account? I can send you an invite. 1GB of storage and a decent spam filter. Plus, it organizes e-mails by conversations so that if say you and someone were exchanging e-mails back and forth about Denise Richards, they’d all be grouped together in one link in your in-box. Plus it uses google to help you search throuhg e-mails when trying to find a specific one. Let me know if you want one!
Welcome back Tom, can I look forward to a race report on the shop site or here on the forum?
Do private messages on the forum get through reliably to you? I thought these might be a best way of getting in touch with you for all your requirements of me and outline for a fit with you. If so I will re-send them.
Just install Spamarrest (spamarrest.com) or something like that, it is a slight obstacle in that people need to verify their e-mail once, but after that it’s clear sailing and it will get rid of almost all of your spam. It sounds like you have a set-up that would work with spamarrest.
Mike Aderhold, our “I.T. guy”, installed a spam filter that was supposed to “learn” what e-mails were spam over time. By the third day it worked quite well. By the fifth day we were having problems with it. Then e-mails were not getting through at all or sporadically. We were basically back to square one. Since then we have uninstalled it.
I know that is the problem with spam filters, but this is not a filter. The first time somebody sends you an e-mail, they get a message that tells them to type a code word. The code word is right there in a picture, so it takes 3 seconds to do but a robot couldn’t do it. After they do that their e-mail goes through, and your computer remembers so the next time the same person sends the e-mail it goes through directly. Bottomline, it takes everybody who e-mails you 3 seconds, once, and then they are home free and you are virtually spam free as your cousin from Nigeria with the 20 million bucks to launder will not type in the code.
Tom–Welcome back, but what I don’t get is why wouldn’t you want a low rate mortgage, free money just for letting somebody use your bank account, free porn and a bigger…part?
Another thing you will want to do once you get a new email address is to not list it in standard form on your website. What I mean is instead of listing: “actiontom@mrtibbsvelvetlair.com”, list it as: “actiontom AT mtribbsvelvetlair DOT com” with instructions to replace the AT and DOT with “@” and “.”, and to strip out the extra spaces.
Any person who sees this will know how to contact you, but this simple measure will foil the majority of the “web spiders” - automated bots crawling the internet looking email addresses.
