The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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3:54pm on Wednesday, 29th July, 2020:
Anecdote
With the server move, my email stopped working for a day or so. Old emails were copies over, so I didn't lose anything.
Hmm. So, I actually have three emails. The one I use is richard@mud.co.uk, but I also have richard@youhaventlived.com and richard@mud.uk . These didn't work on the old server. They do on the new. This brought new horrors to the line "Old emails were copies over, so I didn't lose anything".
There were something like 5,000 emails waiting for me. Given that I'd never told anyone those email addresses, that's pretty good going by the spammers. Unfortunately, in getting my university email to work properly, I had told Outlook to fix itself, which it duly did. It took my spam-defeating rule set down with it, though, meaning that all those emails landed on my PC. I've just spent that afternoon reconstructing my rules list, using the spam from my lost email addresses as exemplars.
Around half the emails were in Chinese characters, so merely by selecting about a hundred of these was I able to send them to the Deleted Items folder. For English spam, the word that made the biggest dent in my inbox when I filtered on it was "inquiry". If you have an inquiry, don't mention it in the email subject line. Surprisingly, there was more spam for printed circuit boards than for Viagra. Also surprisingly, there was more spam for each of f*ck, f&ck, f#ck and f%ck than there was for the word they were trying to sneak past anti-spam defences.
Oh, there were actually four emails waiting for me that had been sent by real people in the expectation that I would reply. I would have done, too, had I seen them at the time rather than five years later (sigh).
Yes, I know Outlook is a pile of junk that reliably crashes when you do anything to more than one rule, but I have every email I've sent since 2000 saved in that format so I'm rather stuck with it.
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Copyright © 2020 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).