My spam folder had 360 emails in this morning. Instead of going through the lot I decided to try and whittle them down by searching on keywords. These seemed to fall into the following main categories, there is some overlap between them:
Sex:
viagra
satisfy/satisfaction
penis/pen1s
Gambling:
royale
casino
Spoofs:
received
reminder
amazon
skype
verizon
address (my address has changed)
mailbox
Gifts:
wathes (watches!)
watches
warranty
received
real
Medicine:
Codeine
Symbols:
$%!?
Desperate/vunerable:
diploma
degree
Misc:
we
something
Using the above I managed to delete about 300 of my initial 360. There were 21 false positives, mostly message failed or undeliverable notices ro auto-emails that were genuine, and about 40 which didn’t fall into any of the above and were not sufficiently volumous to make it worth trying to search on each one.
When I started I thought it would be easier than trawling through them but there were a lot more variables than I expected. It would probably make sense to do this if you’ve been away for a couple of weeks and come back to 3,000+ spam emails but on a daily basis I think I’ll just reach for the delete button.
thawte revisited
ah! after my last frustrated attempt to renew our thawte security cert I was pleased to receive an email from Thawte saying that I have to update my site seal and that this will remove the need in future to update the seal when renewing the certificate – so that’s good news.
Unfortunately we’re now looking to move hosts from Windows -> Apache and as a part of this I’m having to move the security certificate. Thawte have a ‘knowledge base’ article to help with this but 2 thirds of the way down it says ‘Run the following command using OPENSSL’.
Having been to openssl.org and made little headway I asked a thawte support rep for, well support. His response was that they support the cert but not third party applications. While on the one hand I can understand this, on the other if you are going to direct a customer down a certain route which they have no alternative but to go down you should not just wash your hands of it and say ‘good luck’ – or at least not if you don’t want to piss your customer off!