Welcome to the World of XBox360

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As anyone who works with me on a daily basis can attest, I am a freak when it comes to reformatting my computers.  I custom built a system a little over a year ago that would serve as the ultimate entertainment system machine.  My original intent was to use it for Windows Media Center as well as MAME.  This is much cheaper than dropping $300-$500 on a XBox 360 system.  I have finally relented and reconfigured my environment to incorporate the purchase of a new XBox 360.  Several factors influenced the decision.

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Greylisting, Greytrapping and Initial Stuttering: A Novel Approach to Spam Filtering

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By now, most email administrators are aware of several spam filtering techniques such as blacklisting, whitelisting, relay blocking and the like.  The list is long.  These measures take an immediate effect on email as it is received to determine the legitimacy of the email.

No one method of filtering email is effective in itself.  A server may find itself blacklisted by a list maintainer bearing a grudge or due to poor configuration of the sending server.  Then again, you may accidentally whitelist a sender who later starts sending spam your way.  Trying to find the hole to plug it can be a frustrating and time consuming endeavor.  Enter greylisting.

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SPAM-isms

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Being a network administrator, the volume of spam messages that I am forced to wade through every day is ridiculous.  Roughly 85% of all email (incoming and outgoing) passing through the mail server that I manage for 300 users is detected as SPAM.  But even utilizing tightly customized filters does not catch all of it.

On the off chance that any legitimate email is incorrectly flagged as SPAM, I have them all redirected to a public folder that only I can manage.  I go through the folder removing known spam several times a day to keep the server from filling up with the over 5000 daily emails that are directed to it and searching for anything that might have been misdirected.

I normally don't read or open any of the emails, but I check the sender name, recipient name and subject line to determine what to do with each message.  I must say that SPAM subject lines are getting to be quite humorous.  I have decided to collect some of the more entertaining ones below.  They are not for the faint of heart.

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When Antivirus Vendors Become Too Overprotective

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Don't get me wrong.  I am all for protection of computer systems.  Anyone running a computer nowadays without a firewall, virus scanning software, spyware remover and pop-up blocker is just asking for trouble.  But when do the companies that make this software go to far?  Is it really their job to act as the police force for the DMCA?

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