Who’s worse? Your run-of-the-mill spammers, or JMU?
November 6, 2003, 1:15 PM
It’s a toss-up. JMU likes to spam its students on a regular basis. Sure, it’s not anything like the run-of-the-mill spammers who want to get me a mortgage, a supercharged sex life, stocks and more stocks, and porn out the wazoo, but JMU is really getting on my nerves with their school-wide Emails, which really should only be reserved for emergencies. Look at this one:
Now is the time to grab some great deals for the holiday.
Support JMU’s Adult Degree Program’s online auction. Go to
http://www.bisauction.com now! Get registered and then have
fun bidding on some fabulous items like a 2 night stay in
Williamsburg, some great JMU items including a JMU Gumball
Machine, and a cute puppy dog. The auction will continue
through November 21. For more information, e-mail adult-
degree-program@jmu.edu.
There you go. Unsolicited commercial Email from JMU. Let’s say it together: SPAM! The subject even started with the word “Adult”. It’s now really now a case of the pot calling the kettle black, because JMU’s IT department on one hand has all kinds of weird spam filters that eat all kinds of legitimate Email, and then on the other hand facilitates almost any JMU department or organization’s sending its own spam out…
Spam seems to officially be crippling Email, but not how you would think…
October 30, 2003, 11:21 AM
Yes, spam, as in unsolicited commercial Email, is crippling the Email system. But not how you think. It seems that as a result of people and their overzealous spam filters that nowadays I’m more astonished when Email DOES arrive than it getting eaten.
It used to be so easy to get Emails through to people. Address, message, subject, and voila. Done. If I need to send a file as previously discussed, I attach it and go.
Nowadays, there have been cases of all kinds of messages being eaten. Kathleen, the LPCM campus minister, recently sent me a whole bunch of stuff that never showed up, eaten up by the Email monster. I Emailed Dr. Teske a sound that we had previously discussed. Never showed up, though interestingly enough, it did show up for the friend I CC-ed it to who’s on the same server. I Emailed Dr. Skelley a paper recently, and it never showed up. Very frustrating…
At least I got the spam filters taken off of Schumin Web. You send something to my Email address, and I can assure you, I will get it. This after I nearly lost some domain names because the spam filter was eating my confirmation Emails.
It’s sad when I can say that the spammers are winning in destroying Email, but not directly due to their own activities, but rather some overzealous filtering techniques that will eat more Emails than they let through.
Categories: Internet, Schumin Web meta
Well, part one of the battle is solved…
October 22, 2003, 1:53 PM
Well, it turns out that some filters at Schumin Web were eating the Emails. My tech people will be hearing from me. Meanwhile, though, we sent the GoDaddy authorizations through a different route, and I was able to authorize them just fine. Now I pulled all the eHost strings I was supposed to, getting the authorization codes for some and unlocking others, and so the domains ought to move right over just fine, though as the losing (or should we say loser) registrar, they could still screw it up. But we all hope they don’t…
Categories: Internet
It’s times like this when I’m amazed the Internet even works!
October 22, 2003, 12:50 PM
Lately I’ve been trying to do registrar transfers for my different domain names because the new registrar is much cheaper than the old registrar. And amazingly, both seem to be screwing up today. eHost (a reseller for eNom) is looking in amazement at me as I work to transfer ALL my domains away from them. Meanwhile, GoDaddy is having problems sending my confirmation Emails.
And on top of that, the domain I originally tried to transfer to GoDaddy during the summer bombed miserably, since eHost totally had no idea what they were doing as they couldn’t supply me my .org authorization code. I actually had to go so far as to renew that domain with them (which I didn’t want to do), which went through. All the while, they’re swearing on their mother’s right kidney that GoDaddy is the registrar for schuminweb.org, while I’m swearing on their mother’s left kidney that eHost/eNom is the registrar, and that a WHOIS search shows them as the registrar, and I recently renewed with them and it went through just fine.
For GoDaddy, that seems to be a rather easy issue, since I think that the Emails are getting eaten up somewhere along the line, and I’ve Emailed my people to get rid of any spamfilters that they have on my Email. Now eHost, on the other hand… it almost seems as if I need to go down to wherever their offices are and make some heads roll, because this is downright nutty what they’re doing.
Categories: Internet
This is WAY too much equine for me.
August 2, 2003, 9:40 PM
I downloaded the newest version of MSN Messenger (in the version 6 family), and somehow, all of their sample images are the same picture of the horses wearing a hat:
There is such a thing as too much horse, don’t you know…
Categories: Internet