NiallOK’s Blog

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A friend of mine and a newspaper journalist (two separate people) recently emailed me - one to announce her housewarming party, the other to apologise in case she’d spammed me. Nothing unusual there, no - until I looked at the “To:” lines of the emails. The first person had emailed me along with about sixty other people, the second one had about twenty other recipients - all of them in the “To:” line - so all of them now know all the email addresses of all the others.

I’ve replied to both of them, pointing them at the BCC Please web site. Whether they’ll pay attention or not, I dunno. It’s not a case of email etiquette as such (well, okay, it kinda IS really) but it’s always seemed like common sense to me. If you’re sending something out to many people, don’t do it in such a way that all the email addresses are visible to everyone receiving the message. That’s just silly. I mean - I certainly don’t want my personal email address publicised to all your friends and aquaintances and I’m sure most of them will feel the same.

Anyway… rant over…

Here’s Bill doing his “Yo yo yo, homeys!” pose. Anyone out there with Photoshop “skillz” want to paste a basketball shirt onto him? I would, but I’m rushing out the door to work… Maybe I’ll get on it later :p

Anyway,- Bill Gates (the man who, 4 years ago, said that spam would be eradicated within 2 years) has stepped down from his position at Microsoft and will now concentrate on his charitable efforts. BBC News have a good breakdown of the good and bad, the hits and misses of Bill Gates here. It kinda paints Microsoft in a bad enough light, making out that they eat other companies for breakfast, are slow on the uptake, quite litigious, and still enormously successful - all of which, of course, is true.

I wonder what Bill would make of this…

(a van I saw in Swords today)

I just got an email, that - if I click the convoluted and badly spoofed “genuine looking” URL in it - sends me an EXE file to download (called video.exe). Strangely enough, it’s fairly obvious from the URL that it’s going to do that so I NARROWLY avoid clicking it.

Nothing strange there. Nothing strange either about the collection of random words from the dictionary at the bottom of the email, after the URL, designed to fool spam detectors in email clients. They don’t work. The email arrived in the Junk Email folder.

No, the strange thing in this email was the subject, which was:

“what a stupid face you have here, Niall”

Great, eh? I mean, I’ve seen kind and thoughtful spammers, but rude and offensive ones? Yes, - that subject TOTALLY endeared me, egging me on further - definitely made me want to open the email and download and run whatever they told me to…

Yes…

Totally.

Michele Neylon got spam from an Irish company today (it’s not his first time either) - and he’s not the only one.

Today I got a completely unsolicited junk advertising mail from a Cork-based company called ‘Micromail’ promoting their “Interactive Developer Workshops” and yes, it ticks all the boxes too. - Badly formatted HTML email with a spammy subject line, totally impersonal, un-automated unsubscription (involving sending the guy an email at his personal address with the subject “STOP”) and yes, no explanation on why I was chosen to receive this email.

Companies need to learn that this is not acceptable. For some reason, I used to think Irish companies were above peddling their wares via this cheap and abusive use of the Internet, but that thought was proven wrong before.

I’m not sure where Micromail in particular took my email address from, or what made them add it to their mailing list, thinking that I would be interested in their seminars on “Codegear RAD studio” or “JBuilder” software. I never dealt with them before or attended any of their seminars. In fact I’d never heard of them until today. Maybe they should read this… or THIS.

The fact remains that I’m not interested in their wares, nor will I ever be - and nor should anyone, while this is their way of advertising it.