A Month Of Spam.

I use Gmail as my primary e-mail account, and it has a good spam filter.  Out of curiosity I decided to not delete the spam as it arrived but leave it in the spam box to see how much I received in a month.  During August I received 18 messages that the filter considered spam.  A pretty light load compared to what some folks get I'm sure.

It Has Begun.

I've started to get spam with my new Gmail address.

Oh well, I couldn't go spamless forever.

Maintenance.

With the demise of the Saskatoon Free-Net's e-mail service at month's end I needed a new e-mail account. I decided to get a Gmail account, since I wanted something easily accessible from public terminals when I want to look at e-mail on the go. Having done this I've just been changing from my old e-mail address to the new one on various forums and so on I take part in. It's a bit of work, and I suspect I missed a couple of things along the way. Once I transfer some save messages over the SFN account will effectively be dead, and when it goes offline entirely hopefully it will cause problems for the various spammers I get. I do have a Shaw e-mail address, but I want to keep it reserved for certain uses, and besides I already use Google for a number of things, such as writing this blog, so why not get e-mail through them as well?

A Near Miracle.

I was just looking through my e-mail and received an almost shocking message. It was a message from PayPal that was an actual message from PayPal, and not a phishing message from some crook in Lagos. One of the ways to determine it's really a message from PayPal and not a phishing attempt is that they'll use your account name in the body of the letter. Given how infrequently I use my PayPal account it's surprising they'd bother to send me a message at all.

I Spoke Too Soon.

I was wrong in my last post. Today I got a bunch more of that same annoying e-mail. Oh well, it only takes a few seconds to delete them.

Hurray!

The past few days I've been getting a bunch of bogus eBay messages in my e-mail, all purporting to be from the same eBay seller asking for payment. Of course the item in question isn't one I purchased. Usually you get a bunch of these a week claiming to be about different eBay transactions, not all about one. Most peculiar. In any case I just checked my mail, and I haven't received any in a few hours. So either it was a really clueless scammer who gave up, or someone finally cleaned a virus out of their e-mail system.