Author: Ben

Here’s an email I recently received from the folks at Audiogon:

Hello,

It has recently come to our attention that many Audiogon Members are using the Audiogon name in their e-mail addresses. This is not only a violation of copyright laws but it also opens up the Audiogon brandname for abuse in the nature of “Paypal” and other such internet business related e-mail scams. As a result, we are issuing a formal request for these members to change/remove their e-mail addresses.

We request that the e-mail address be changed within 48 hours from the time of notification or else face membership suspension. Additionally, we ask that use of the violating address be discontinued within four weeks.

Thank you,
Audiogon Management

Now, since I own blowery.org, I often make up “fake” email addresses for different services.  I do this so I can trace which services sell my email address to other services.  Over the years, it’s come in quite handy.  In this case, I was using the email address audiogon at blowery dot org for the service.  To their credit, I havn’t received much, if any, spam from that address.

This email really made me angry.  I feel like it’s insinuating that I’m a criminal in some way, when I’m just trying to keep my email world a bit more organized.  I am not a lawyer, so I have no idea if their claim actually holds any water, but I’d love to hear from anyone else who’s gotten this kind of notice to see what happened.  As it stands, I’m just going to let them cancel my account, as I havn’t logged onto the site in a few years, so it’s really no skin off my nose to “lose” the account.

Thoughts?

The new licensing terms for Windows Vista are blatantly ridiculous. Guess I’m sticking with XP, OSX and Ubuntu for my day to days. Pitty. Vista looked to be pretty cool.

Update: They’ve rescinded the only-install-once-ever bit of the license. Now if they’d just remove the not-in-a-VM restriction, I’d be happy.

If you’re seeing this, the upgrade to DasBlog 1.9.6240 went smoothly and all is well. Thanks to Scott and company for all the great work. For whatever reason, permalinks based on the post title never worked for me before, but now they do, and I love it. Nice looking URLs are always a plus!

They seem to think this kid is being impatient, but I know that rage. He’s actually debugging a web page in IE6.

For the last week or so, I’ve been dealing with a new form of “spam” that’s particularly annoying. Instead of the spammer sending me mail directly, they’ve been sending spam as me, using made up addresses at blowery.org (like asdfasdf@blowery.org). The sent mail is bounced by the destination mail server, and guess who it bounces back to? That’s right, me. I have a wildcard filter set up on my mail server, so mail sent to *@blowery.org eventually gets back to me. Sadly, this includes failure to deliver notices as well as standard mail, as SMTP doesn’t really differentiate between the two.

To make matters a bit worse, Exchange (in it’s infinite wisdom) forwards these rejections on to me as notices which are not really email. How very Notes of you, Exchange. You can’t filter notices using rules and they’re not picked up by spam filters, so you’re basically stuck with ’em. Sad.

So, at this point, I’m not sure what to do. I don’t want to turn off my wildcard, as I create madeup email accounts for all sorts of things, mainly so I can filter on that address if someone starts spamming it. I could start setting up specific forwards, but that doesn’t really help me when I’m signing up for a newsletter at a fruit stand and want to make up a new one.

Does anyone with more Exchange experience than I have a way to fix this? Can I somehow tell Exchange not to send me these notices, or change the expiration on them? I noticed that it seems they expire after a couple days; could I try to get that reduces to a couple hours? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.