Posts matching tags 'email'
2007/5/17
An email, incorrectly claiming that Apple's iPhone and Leopard had been delayed, wiped US$4bn off the value of the company. Once Apple issued a clarification, stock soon climbed back to most of its original value within about 15 minutes.
I wonder whether whoever sent the email managed to snag some bargain-priced Apple shares.
2005/7/27
It turns out that web filtering software from US company Symantec has been blocking anti-war emails. Mails containing links to www.afterdowningstreet.org were blocked by Symantec's anti-spam software, because the link allegedly received 46,000 complaints. Which means either that all it takes to censor the public's email in the US (and, presumably, other countries which buy Symantec software) is the capacity to send a lot of complaints (which is not hard these days), or that it is Symantec policy to use its power in the marketplace to impose a specific political ideology, à la Wal-Mart. (Does anybody know whether the owners of Symantec have a specific political bias?)
2005/2/1
A proposed solution to email spam, which takes into account advances in character-recognition algorithms (which can now trivially break many "captcha" schemes) and the economics of spammers hiring sweatshop workers to transcribe the codes in question. It involves automatic whitelists, disposable sub-addresses, and are-you-a-human tests based on interpreting computer-rendered scenes involved humanoid figures and flowers.
2003/6/27
Charlie Stross has a rant up titled "Ten reasons why I do not read HTML email".
While I don't take as hard a line on it as Mr. Stross, I pretty much agree with the sentiment; HTML email is wasteful, a nonstandard kludge mandated by the Microsoft/Netscape marketing departments and rarely if ever does it do anything text can't do. I also use Mutt as my mail client; reading my mail involves logging into a UNIX machine I have a shell account on and running mutt; this means I'm not tied to reading my mail where I keep my (hypothetical) copy of Outlook/Eudora/Apple Mail and don't have to depend on webmail systems (which are, at best, a compromise; they're good if you're backpacking through Outer Mongolia or something but not something you'd want to use from day to day).
The problem, however, is that a lot of non-spam email is HTML-only these days; especially with Hotmail (which is surprisingly popular with people who aren't UNIX geeks; and I'm not going to be so haughty as to only correspond with fellow techies and penguinheads) now sending HTML only by default. So after spending some time trying to ask non-technical users to switch to plain text because I'm one of the last few remaining mortals to not use a web browser to read their mail, I configured my mutt client to automatically convert HTML to plain text, by piping it through lynx -dump. Since lynx doesn't do images or Javascript, this avoids "web bugs" and various spammers' tricks.
I still don't read mail with JPEGs/Microsoft Word documents/&c. though. And when Microsoft Trusted DRM-Mail or whatever comes in, I won't read that.
2000/10/9
Surprise, surprise: If you use web-based email or ICQ from work, your employer can read your mail, regardless of what the banner ads say. (via Slashdot)