Spam

This week is one of those work an extra hour Mon-Thurs to get Friday afternoon off – 9 hours. Painting kitchen cabinets, a light color over dark requiring 3 coats. Can only do half of the cabinets at a time to maintain working kitchen – 1.5 hours. Eat (breakfast & dinner) – 1 hour. String lights on Christmas tree (wife hangs ornaments.) – 1 hour. Blog – 1 hour. Read Miata.net forum – 1/2 hour. Shower – 1/2 hour. Sleep – 6 hours. 3.5 hours left over? Doesn’t seem like that. I must be forgetting something. Oh yeah, deleting spam – 3 hours. 😉

I went shopping for my new USB Thumb Drive on the net. I started with the Lockergnome version of a price grabber search and then tried yahoo shopping. At Yahoo I found a good deal on a 128MEG Apacer drive with a neato docking station/extension cord thingie for $49 from here. I placed my order using the info in my Yahoo Wallet and within moments received a confirmation email. So far, so good.

Later that night I got an email informing me that for security reasons they won’t ship to a different address than my billing address. I am informed, in a way that lead me to believe that English was not the author’s original language, that I need to fill out the attached form and fax it back to them. The them in question is a outfit called SuperMediaStore.com not the dvd-rw media .com I thought I bought from. The return email address is supermediastore_annie@linkyo.com, so I type in www.linkyo.com into the address bar of IE and I get a generic “we haven’t been built yet” page from yahoo/Geocities hosting. Now things are not so good, the warm and fuzzy I felt on originally ordering is all but gone, but being a red-blooded American consumer, the low price offered kept me in the game. It was too late to call the phone number in the email, even with the West Coast time difference, so I figured I’d wait until I get to work in the morning and fax the authorization in.

This morning I checked my email before heading off to work and I discovered an email from DVD-RWMedia.Com AKA Selvi@linkyo.com promising me a free pen drive if I bought a 25 pack of DVD-RW discs. Jeez, spammed already, I don’t remember any place to opt in or out of email offers during the checkout process from these folks.

Still intent to go through with the purchase, I went down to the fax machine and loaded up my form. After several rings, I could here the announcement in the background, “The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again.” I check the number on the paper against the number I dialed and they match. Well, that was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, I’ve got to find another place to get my drive from.

When I tried to call the number that was listed on the web page for canceling, I got the same “no longer in service” message that I got when faxing. Then I went to Annie’s email and below her name was an 888 number and a different fax number (it probably works.) After listening to the 8 branches of voice mail tree I selected Customer Service and was connected to probably the same person who would have answered any of the selections. Judging by the voice, it was probably Annie Ang, author of the email. After seeing that the order was on hold in her system, she told me, “No problem, I’ll cancel it.”

There was a place that was close to getting my business yesterday, so I hunted them up in the history file and went back. Ordered a 128 MEG drive from a place called Wolverine Data. No fancy docking station, but it does come with a couple of different color covers so I can match it to my wardrobe or mood. 🙂 Like yesterday, I got an almost instant confirmation email. So far, so good.

Today I got an email telling me the drive had shipped.

Back in the wild and wooly days of the internet, 10-15 years ago, I signed up with a cool service, bigfoot, that promised me an email address for life for free. They gave me an address and what ever email was sent to that address, they would forward to any email address I chose. This was a thing of beauty, I gave it out to all my friends and family, it was my address, Brian_the_Red@bigfoot.com. Bigfoot grew and and offered more services, one of which I found really handy was distribution, I could have all the mail I got come to home and work. The internet grew and email grew and it became all about the money. Bigfoot cut back on all their services except the original forwarding. The other stuff was still available, but for a fee. Earlier this year they put a cap on the amount of mail I could get for free each day to 25. This is probably a reasonable amount for personal use. I have probably never gotten 25 pieces of mail on one day that was important to me. The trouble is SPAM. I have been sprinkling the internet with this address for the last 15 years and the SPAM just rolls in. Every day that I exceed the 25 limit, I get a nice little email from bigfoot reminding me I’m missing out on getting some of my mail. It seems like like I was getting one everyday. On some days I know I’m not getting 25 emails even with all the spam. Yesterday I got 2 warnings I was over 25? The end of an era (at least in internet time,) I’m giving up on bigfoot. I sent everybody a change of address and after a while I’ll quit even checking it.

The last couple of days my in basket has been extremely light. One reason is I haven’t been getting any mail in the Masters Miata account. Way back in April Yahoo cut off POP3 access to your email. You had to log on and use the web based mail program (so they could subject you to several ads just to read one email message.) A couple of clever folks figured out a way around this (you just knew somebody would.) YahooPops worked fine up until a little while ago, then Yahoo changed their layout. This made the program hang and when it didn’t hang, the mail just wouldn’t come in via Outlook Express. Turns out I just needed to get the updated version of YahooPops and change a setting. Mail again.

Another reason is BellSouth got their spam buster, Mail Guard, online and running. When they announced it a month or so back, my first instinct was to turn it off, I wanted to choose what I saw not some software filter. Forgot all about it until I thought today that maybe that is why my mail has been light. Sure enough it has been running for the last 5 days and had snared 64 messages in it’s filter. I waded through looking at the subjects and you know, they were all junk! I guess I’ll leave it on and if it works 100% for the next 2 or 3 weeks I ‘ll just leave it and forget it.