Mat Bowles

Awhileback, after liadnan posted a link, I joined The Culture List, an Iain M. Banks discussion list. Thing is, like many mailing list, it's been going for years. Many many years The regular members know each other (and many have LJs *waves*), and the original topic has been done to death. Nowadays it appears to be almost comlpetely off topic rambling. For the last three or four days, it's been, almost exclusively, a Mac vs all comers flame war. It got a little boring very quickly, but, well, 130+emails later, it seems to be dying off. However, in the dying embers, Josh posted this, which amused; I missed it the first time around, bot someone else picked up on it, so went back and found it:

> Maybe we should just have it out with longswords on the field of glory?
>
> Every OS manufacturer for themselves.

( > Microsoft's champion > The Apple warrior > The Linux fighter )

Sounds about right. What is it about Mac fanatics that they just won't shut up? I rarely encounter any Windows fanboying; it's not "Windows is great", it's more a "Windows might suck, but it's what we have to work with". Some Mac users just don't seem to get it.

Ah well. Good mailing list, even if it is a lot of noise. Don't know how I'd handle it if I wasn't using Gmail's conversation view at times though; the joys of filters...

OK, awhileback I switched off my postmaster accounts on the domains, and got everything to forward to one inbox. I check the spam folder every hour or so anyway, and just delete whatever is in there, haven't had a false positive for ages now.

Today, I decided not to bother deleting stuff, I just marked all as read to see when new stuff came in.

So, tally from when I logged off approx 24 hours ago and now? 253 spam emails.

The moral to this story? Meh, I've never tried hiding my email addresses, but I suspect putting it up unscreened on a domain name owned by a friend hosted on Geocities when I redesigned it for him was probably a bad plan. Also, owning two domains, one of which is being spoofed for outgoing by at least one spammer is really annoying. I think I may switch postmaster back on. Oh, having the admin account being also my main contact account was stupid as well. Learnt the lesson on that one. I'll probably switch the fuzzyduck email address from MatB to MatGB at some point, and at this point I'll let TaKtix lapse, not using it at all, and it's not a cheap hosting package like fuzzyduck...

But, dude? 253 spam emails in 24 hours? FFS. Only 2 got into the inbox though, they're right, spam is going to die soon, the filtering is too good. If people stopped buying the crap they advertise we'd all be better off as well. If I want viagra, or cialis, or even \/146R4, I'll go see a doctor. I can't afford stocks or shares, there is no way I'm taking out a US based home loan, and if I want to look for Euro porn I'll just look for it, it's not like search engines can't find porn easily. Yet, somewhere out there, blithering idiots respond to these mails and make the spammers money. Stop it. Please.