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October 23rd, 2006

It is raining

raining spam

I spend a large percentage of my time online dealing with spam. E-mails, comments on the Wiblog system and comments on this blog are the main three. Automated anti-spam systems can help a bit, but at the end of the day one still has to go through everything for what are called ‘false positives’, which are like ‘false prophets’ but spelt differently.

One day the whole internet will be so overwhelmed with spam that we will have to give up on it. I will be so inflicted before most people, at which point I will turn off the computer for ever and spend my days tending a small vegetable patch.



This is a single Cartoon Blog entry, posted by Dave on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 11:40 am.

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8 Responses to “It is raining”


  1. joeturner says:

    I know the feeling. According to my spam filter, your email there is a 95% chance your emails are spam, Dave.

    Fortunately I am ahead of you on the vegetable patch. Planting onions is far more satisfying than weeding out non-spam emails.

    October 23rd, 2006 at 12:10 pm
  2. Karin says:

    I was going to say, ‘I know the feeling’, but Joe has beaten me to it.

    I have spammers to delete almost daily from my website, spam e-mails to my website address, spam e-mails in my in-box (not too many, thankfully) and dozens of spam e-mails to my google account.

    Some days I also feel I should just give it all up. Is it worth it in the long run?

    It seems to be getting worse. I blame the fools who make it worth the spammers’ while, but maybe the spammers are the fools who think it will be worth their while even though it isn’t.

    October 23rd, 2006 at 12:36 pm
  3. joeturner says:

    Oh dear, apologies. I think I need a brain filter to make sure any comments I write make sense.

    October 23rd, 2006 at 12:38 pm
  4. Karin says:

    P.S. I’ve only planted a few onions, along with some garlic. I’ve still got a lot of onion sets left in the packet so I may have to put them in a tub. The garlic can wait a bit until we’ve cleared more ground, but I believe onions need to be planted by the end of October at the latest.

    October 23rd, 2006 at 12:39 pm
  5. Lizzie says:

    My onions and garlic are in, too. And my purple brussles sprouts are going great guns.

    Does anyone else get the vivid mental image, when talking of spam filters, of luncheon meat being pressed through a sieve?

    No? Just me, then. Hmmmm

    October 23rd, 2006 at 5:10 pm
  6. Commenter says:

    The only spam emails I get in my anti-spam folder are from my server and from someone called Dave Walker! Aren’t I lucky? I always read them avidly. My computer is ‘oh so slow’ though!

    October 23rd, 2006 at 8:56 pm
  7. Mandy says:

    Thanks for this, it made me smile - lots. 135 deleted only yesterday - Do you think they are part of the 0.1% that household web-bleaches don’t get?

    October 23rd, 2006 at 10:12 pm
  8. Nefertiki says:

    I am wondering whether you might do the same as we do when commenting on wiblogs — i.e. make commenters use the character-recognition thingy to prove we are not a menace? I wouldn’t mind going through that process when attempting to write one of my endless comments — why I’d even stand on one leg while patting my head and rubbing my tumming to be enabled to comment here.

    Of course, I know nothing about computers, although just this morning when a techie told me over the phone that my problem was too severe for him to help and to bring my computer to a repair shop, I said, Nonsense! I hung up, turned my computer off and then on and now it’s working perfectly. The problem was that I couldn’t write comments or anything for that matter.

    October 26th, 2006 at 7:20 pm