Kurtopia

Today I attended a presentation/discussion on Wharton’s plan to deploy Microsoft Exchange 2007.  By far the most active portion of this discussion was about spam: whether to block it or simply filter (or both), where to do so, and how.  It made me realize that every time people talk about spam, they tend to forget one critical component: preventing it in the first place.

Once you start getting spam, there’s nothing to do except block and/or filter it — either way, spammers are still sending things to you.  The key is to protect your email address as much as possible from the moment it is created.

I’ve been at Wharton for over six years now, and thus have had my Wharton email address that long.  I get very little spam at that address.  In fact, the majority of the spam I do get is from mailing lists I’m on — spam sent directly to my account is almost non-existent.  The reason for this is because I’ve been pretty careful about protecting my email address.

The best way to prevent your email address from ending up on a spammer’s mailing list is to make sure that it is never posted on the public web.  If it’s absolutely necessary to post your address, then you need to make sure that Javascript or another technique is used to obfuscate it from the bots that troll web pages look for email addresses.  Even better, replace mailto: links with a web form that fires off an email.  And if scripts start spamming that form, a CAPTCHA will pretty much stop them dead in their tracks.  When you’re taking the time to post a comment on a blog, sign someone’s guestbook (if people still even use these things), or post to a message board, make sure that it’s not going to display your email address in plain sight.

Also, be careful about which sites you give your email address to.  Don’t worry about the reputable ones, like Amazon.com, but be wary of those you’ve never heard of.  If you need to enter an email address in order to download something, for example, first try entering a completely phoney address.  If it turns out that you need a legit address in order to receive a link to the download, then establish and use a throwaway address from any number of free web email providers.

IT professionals: educate your users from day one about how to keep their email addresses at least relatively spam-free!

In terms of spam filtering, though, I do have to give props to Gmail for the best darn spam filter I’ve ever seen.

My cycloptic former colleague sent this to me whilst on her honeymoon in Tokyo.

Oh Vista, don’t be such a drama queen.

Geeks Are Sexy has this hilarious clip from Curb Your Enthusiasm about a guy yapping away in a restaurant using a Bluetooth headset.  Did I mention that it is hilarious?

Did you know that there is a National Toy Hall of Fame?  Well, there is!  There aren’t really any surprises on it, if you ask me.  I’m hoping that some day the original NES will be on there (the Atari 2600 was added only recently), along with Transformers, of course!

I can’t say that I saw this resemblance on my own, but now that it’s been pointed out, I totally agree.

I don’t normally watch Scrubs, but it came on after The Office last night.  In the episode, Donald Faison’s character (Dr. Christopher Turk) could be seen wearing an Optimus Prime t-shirt!  This is at least the second Transformers reference to have appeared on Scrubs.

How fortuitous!  I saw a blog post earlier this week with a screen shot of a desktop that had a Super Mario Bros. background.  I said to myself, “Self… that’s cool!  I wonder where I can find something like that?”

The answer?  Right here!