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Getting rid of spam. It's an endless battle. |
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The Problem: If you've got mail, you've got spam. Getting rid of it
is almost impossible. Here's what happens. Bulk emailers scavenge
through web sites, chat rooms, and other online places for every email
address they can find. They find millions of email addresses probably including
yours, and sell them to anyone who wants to send bulk unsolicited email
or spam. Once your email address gets on one of the bulk email CD's
you'll get spam. It's not just 2 friends tell 2 friends, it's thousands
of non-friends tell thousands of non-friends who all send you spam every
day. |
Solutions
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Deal with it. If you only get 3 or 4 spam messages a day,
consider yourself lucky. It's probably easier to just hit the delete key
and get on with life. But if like me, and get 50-100 spam messages
a day, you need defensive measures. |
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Get a new email address. Sounds severe, but once you're on a spam
list, it's like the MTA. You'll never get off. If you know everyone
who sends you email, you can just notify them of your new email address.
Of course this is only a temporary solution. Pretty soon your new email
address will get on a spam list. |
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Have your ISP filter your mail. I haven't seen an anti-spam program I
trust so you don't want them to delete anything. Also you have no
control over their filter process. If they quarantine all the spam by
putting it in another mail box, that means you have to log on and check
the spam box as well as your inbox. That's a drag. |
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Anti Spam Programs. There are dozens of programs that scan your
incoming email to try to separate legitimate email from spam. Prices
range from free to about $30. As always, you get what you pay for. |
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Spammers of course do everything they can to trick these programs by
making their spam look like legitimate email. Quite often legitimate
email gets flagged as spam, so you almost need to look through the spam
to make sure you don't miss important emails from people you know
that may "look" like spam. |
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I've tried a number of programs including the filters built into Outlook
to try to tame this beast. All of them had problems ranging from being
cumbersome to not working well. |
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There are some anti-spam programs that are supposed to just "work" and
intuitively remove spam. This just plain won't work, so if you ever get
important email, you need to scan through all the quarantined email just
to be sure an important email didn't get blocked. That sort of defeats the
purpose. I wanted something that completely killed the definite spam and
only made me scan the questionable stuff. |
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I finally just got fed up with the time it took to setup filters, and
just process the email, that I wrote my own Anti Spam program. |
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Hopefully a few convictions and large fines under some of the new
anti-spam laws will help minimize this problem. |
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Until then, there is DHASpam. Try it for free. |
Windows Shutdown problems
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The Problem |
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Windows 95 and 98 have a history of hanging during shut down so you
never get the message that it's ok to turn off your computer. |
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A new or clean install of Windows will work fine, but after you add some
collection of programs and drivers you get the famous shutdown problem.
It's a drag because after you power down and reboot Windows wants to run
scandisk. Just in case. Generally it's a total waste of time. I've
probably rebooted maybe 500-1000 hung computers and I've never seen a
disk problem from powering down. But Windows won't be really happy until
you let scandisk run. (Actually there is a log file on your boot drive
tells the system Scandisk hasn't finished). |
Solutions |
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Just Deal With it. It's clearly an annoyance but it's not the
most annoying thing on the planet. It's not even the most annoying from
Microsoft. |
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Never turn the computer off. You still need to reboot every now
and again depending on what programs you run. Windows 95/98 also had
problems managing memory, so if you leave the machine on you will eventually use all available memory. |
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Fix it. According to Microsoft, most shutdown problems involve
the drivers for the video graphics adapter. You might try downloading
the latest drivers from the manufacturer of your video card. |
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Generally the drivers are specific for the graphics chip, so you may
find them on the web site of the company that made the graphics chip
(most likely the biggest chip) on the video card. If that doesn't work,
you can do a google search for the word "drivers" and the chip number. |
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Upgrade to Windows 2000. I like Windows 2000. I have no shutdown
problems. Sometimes it takes a while, but
eventually it shuts down. Windows 2000 also manages memory
much better than Windows 9x (that's the buzz word for either
Windows 95 or Windows 98). |
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I suppose Windows XP will also eliminate the problem. I just can't quite
bring myself to like XP, although it may be unavoidable. Somewhere I saw
this line about XP: |
An infinite number of monkeys typing into an infinite number of
computers would eventually produce Windows XP....... and they did.
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Here's more information from the Microsoft web site about
Windows Shutdown problems. |
