cellio | technological disappointments

I don't care about iPhone at all, but the announcement of AppleTV caught my interest. I'd probably pay $300 for a device that lets me dump the cable service (depending on what content costs). I don't watch a lot of TV but I don't want to watch what I do watch on my computer; this fills a real need for me. Alas, it appears (from Apple's site) that my plain old TV, bought about five years ago, can't talk to this new box; they use the words "widescreen" and "enhanced definition", neither of which I think applies to my TV (assuming "widescreen" means 16:9 instead of the standard 4:3 aspect ratio -- why that should make a difference when they could just letterbox is beyond me). They can make an allowance for wired networks but not for recent-but-not-current TVs? Bummer.

Spam subject line of the day: "mollusk suffrage". On consideration, giving them the vote probably wouldn't make things worse.

I cleaned out my spam traps last night; the problem has definitely gotten worse recently. There's more spam and the distribution (or performance of various filters) has changed:

My filters, in order of firing, are:

Pobox bounce: 200 messages/day (these generate unknown-address notices)
Pobox trap: about 75 messages/day
Procmail 1 (SpamAssassin score 7+ and a few specific targets): about 100 messages/day
Procmail 2 (aka "maybe spam"; gets about 5% false positives): about 10 messages/day

I haven't been keeping careful records, but I think about 15-20 messages/day get through all that to my inbox.

Gak. That's about 400 pieces of spam per day aimed at my mailbox, of which about a third are getting through to my mail host. (I want this stuff to be caught as far upstream as possible.) Pobox used to catch a higher proportion; in addition, the ratio of Pobox bounce:trap used to be about 5:1, not the current ~3:1. I can't say that this is a Pobox degradation, though, as it wasn't long ago that I got about 100 pieces of spam a day, total. Pobox is presumably trapping everything it used to and a good deal more, but the spammers have gotten more clever. (I should write a procmail rule to catch any message that begins with an image.) I used to browse the traps about once a week looking for legitimate mail, but even with search that's getting impractical. I no longer inspect the bounce trap at all.

The spammers have caused email reliability to revert to that of the UUCP days, when there was a chance that your legitimate message just plain never got there. Thanks, guys.

technological disappointments

Re: Did my message get past your spam filters?