Mark's Notebook

Guestbook back online

The Mixed-Up site guestbook is back online after a hiatus of about 18 months. There have been no new entries allowed since the end of 2003, but I did manually enter one person's email in the middle of 2004.

I had this terrible problem where people were spamming my guestbook with links to pornography and stupid advertising. I didn't realize this because the guestbook was not sending me any emails. It is supposed to send me email every time someone signs the guestbook, so that I can thank them for their time.

However, after changing servers in early 2002, that mechanism stopped working and I did not even know it. (For the technically inclined, this had to do with ownership of the processes running on the server. I eventually had to fix other similar problems by specifying the full path of each program to be run. This is because the new server is unaware of my path or any path.)

I delayed fixing this problem because I wanted to put something much more robust in place. Now, if anyone puts garbage in my guestbook, I can remove it by just clicking.

Why do people do this? I guess they do it for the same reason they fill my email box with spam. How many spam emails do you get? I bet I get more than you. I have two levels of spam filtering ... one at the ISP, and another on my computer at home. The ISP uses SpamAssassin and it's not bad. It probably catches about 90-95% of the spam addressed to me. I'm not sure exactly how many emails that is, but I have a background process that deletes the file every six hours, and it's usually about 1 megabyte. So that's about 4 megabytes of spam every day.

The second level takes place on my computer. I have given my email program (Eudora, it's fantastic) a huge set of rules that catch most spam. It catches any emails that originate in Argentina, Germany, Estonia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, and certain set of IP addresses. It also looks for emails with certain familiar subjects, and emails that have bad attachments, like ZIP files and screen savers. Currently, I'm getting 1000-2000 spam emails per day. That's after SpamAssassin. I figure that before SpamAssassin I'm getting about 20,000 spam emails per day.

Those of you with eagle eyes will notice that my Guestbook has been up this whole time. But, you have not been able to post to it directly. If you like the site, or if you have constructive criticism, the guestbook is the place to make your comments public.

http://www.mixed-up.com/guestbook/

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Last updated Tuesday 13 May 2008