the dissident frogman

19 years and 3 months ago

Too Furious To Rant ♠ Trop En Rogne Pour Râler

the dissident frogman

Necrothreading much?

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I'll spare you the details for the sake of my own nerves, as the simple idea of what's been happening over the last months is enough to raise my blood temperature up to the boiling level.

I'll get straight to the bottom line: if you emailed me these past months, and never received any answer, chances are your email never made it to me because it was (wrongly) caught in my anti-spam defenses.

I receive between 200 and 400 spam emails every day. It comes from almost everywhere, and it comes in English, Italian, Hebrew, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, etc. On a 'good' day, the number can easily jump to 800/1 000. Every frigging day.

And that's not including the waves of emails spreading worms and trojans.

As this is an ever-growing trend, I'm forced to regularly upgrade, double, or triple my spam barriers. Unfortunately, and for reasons I still need to investigate, the last upgrade was 'excessively efficient'.

The good thing is that I don't trust those email filters enough to let them delete incoming mail they tag as spam. With a bit more than 500 Gb of hard disk space, I can afford to have those countless trash mails sitting in a quarantine folder, just in case some legitimate ones get caught in the net too.

The bad news is that now, I have to go through thousands of Nigerian scams and other phony offers, to dig up the victims of my heavy artillery. And I mean tenths of thousands, actually.

The massacre is almost total. Not only first time mailers got wiped out, but emails from people with whom I already conversed in the past (which, presumably, should have been in the white list) where tagged as spam mail and 'disposed' accordingly by the filters.

I wish to offer you an apology, if you are in that case -- And I'm sorry to imagine that you probably think I was dismissive. This was not the case, unless of course your email ranked among the death threats and other vain abuses.

Even though I'll be slowly making my way through the pile of junk mail in order to eventually return you a belated answer, I beg you to forward me again any email on any subject, be it serious or casual, on which you requested my attention -- should you believe that it had been caught in the spam blocks. For what I've seen so far, it could even be as old as 5 months. (I bet the title is beginning to make sense now, does it?)

I lowered the defenses, I'll be watching the quarantine's content more closely than ever, and all I ask for Christmas is the MS 361 C and 5 minutes with one of those low life spam clowns.

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Je vous épargne les détails pour le bien de mes propres nerfs, car la simple idée de ce qui s'est passé ces derniers mois suffit à élever ma température sanguine au niveau d'ébullition.

J'irais droit au but : si vous m'avez écrit dernièrement, et n'avez jamais reçu de réponse, il est fort probable que votre email ne me soit jamais parvenu, ayant été (incorrectement) intercepté par mes défenses anti-spam.

Je reçois entre 200 et 400 spam mails chaque jour. Cela arrive d'un peu partout, et se présente en anglais, italien, hébreu, espagnol, chinois, portugais, russe, etc. Les jours 'fastes', le chiffre monte aisément à 800/1 000. Tous les noms de Dieu de jours.

Et cela n'inclue pas les vagues de vers et de chevaux de Troie se propageant par email.

La tendance étant en progression constante, je suis contraint de renforcer, doubler ou tripler régulièrement mes barrières anti-spam. Malheureusement, et pour des raisons qu'il m'incombe toujours d'éclaircir, la dernière mise à jours s'est avérée 'excessivement efficace'.

La bonne nouvelle, c'est que je ne fais pas suffisamment confiance à ces filtres d'emails pour les laisser supprimer les messages entrants qu'ils désignent comme spam. Avec un peu plus de 500 Gb d'espace disque, je peux me permettre de laisser ces innombrables détritus s'entasser dans un répertoire de quarantaine, juste au cas où certains messages légitimes se verraient également pris dans les mailles du filet.

La mauvaise nouvelle, c'est que je dois maintenant parcourir des milliers d'arnaques nigériennes et autres offres bidon afin d'extraire les victimes de mon artillerie lourde. Et j'entends par là, en fait, des dizaines de milliers.

Le massacre est presque total. De plus, il ne se limite pas aux nouveaux correspondants, car des mails en provenance de personnes avec qui j'avais déjà conversé dans le passé (donc censés figurer dans la white list) ont été étiquetés comme spam et acheminés en conséquence par les filtres.

Je vous présente donc des excuses -- Et je suis désolé à l'idée que vous ayez pu penser que je vous ignorais à desseins ou par négligence. Ce n'est pas le cas, sauf bien entendu si votre email était à classer au rayon menaces de mort et autres vaines insultes.

Je procède lentement parmi la liste de junk mail afin de vous envoyer le cas échéant une réponse, aussi tardive soit elle, mais je vous prie néanmoins de me renvoyer tout email sur tout sujet, sérieux ou futile, sur lequel vous vouliez attirer mon attention -- si vous pensez qu'il ait pu être captif de mes pièges à spam. Pour ce que j'en ai vu, cela peut remonter dans certains cas à 5 mois. (J'imagine que le titre commence à prendre tout son sens maintenant ?)

J'ai abaissé les défenses, je contrôlerais le contenu de la quarantaine plus étroitement que jamais, et tout ce que je demande pour Noël c'est une MS 361 C et 5 minutes avec l'un de ces minables de spammers.

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the dissident frogman

I own, built and run this place. In a previous life I was not French but sadly, I died.

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To reveal my email address, find the 5th  number in the code and enter it in the challenge field below.

10123

The Wise knows that Cities are but demonic Soul-tearing pits that shall not be entered.

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The Wise knows that Cities are but demonic Soul-tearing pits that shall not be entered.

Comments thread (6)

1710 - Valerie

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How sad. To think of all those lonely hearts who proposed marriage or more if affinity only to NEVER get an answer from their beloved fantasy frogman... Oh, the humanity!

1711 - Steve

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I sympathize with you completely, I have my own domain also, and opening my email client this morning I see I have 427 new messages, of which 426 are spam. I also move all flagged spam to a holding area where I may or may not get around to looking through it. Just last month I found an email from a relative, which would have gotten deleted if I hadn't sifted through it.

1712 - TM Lutas

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There are some simple things that help. Sort by subject or sender groups an awful lot of spam mail together and you can kill it all more quickly in weekly runs through your quarantined mail.

1713 - Djerzinsky

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wouldn't it be easier to filter out email that do not have an identifying item. for instance you could request that emails have a "Dear Frogman of war" on the first line else they be considered spam. should require a little tweak but if you have a lot of incoming mails it sounds like a potential solution to filter out that important one out of all these nigerian scams.

1714 - Tino

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One possibility is to have your spamfilter bounce all messages that seem like spam, with instructions to re-send the message with a specific tag in the subject (e.g. "NOT-SPAM"). Actual spammers don't look at their bounces, but legitimate e-mailers would get the bounce message and re-send their message with the tag. If you wanted to get particularly fancy, you could have anyone who had ever re-sent an erroneously bounced message to a whitelist, so they'd only have to go through the process one time.

1715 - Patrick Crozier

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  • Patrick Crozier

And there was I assuming you just didn't want to talk to me. Maybe you didn't... FWIW I tend to have a private and a public e-mail - that seems to cut down on things.