I’ve just been through more than 3,000 emails! I decided to have a look at my spam folder on geofffox.com. The mail server itself is hosted by Google’s Gmail and I use their filters.
The filters do a mostly good job – with notable exceptions.
There were four emails from my Cousin Melissa. They were sent over the last two weeks. Google thinks she’s spammy. She was the only human stopped by their machine.
Interestingly enough, other emails from her made it through without a problem.
The filter also improperly trapped warnings automatically sent from my website, telling me there about spam comments needing attention. I found most of them, not all, on my own.
This is one real weakness with Gmail’s filtering. You cannot flag specific words or IP addresses to bypass the filtering. The spam filters go into action before anything else.
Nor can you search entries that are spam filtered. So, I couldn’t go through the 3,000+ messages, looking for email that originated on my own site!
On October 10-11, a spammer began to carpet bomb the world with messges using my domain, geoffox.com, as his return address. In that 48 hour period, I received hundreds upon hundreds of bouncebacks from closed mailboxes and spam filters. I can only imagine how many messages from the faux Fox got through!
These messages I checked today were only for the geofffox.com domain. Gmail covers me on a bunch of other addresses too. Sometime this weekend, I have another few thousand to pour through.
The false positive rate was slightly under 1% and supposedly Gmail’s filters learn by my re-marking the spam. That means the number should be lower in the future.
Still, even one false positive is too many. Right Cousin Melissa?
The Sun has just set. I am sitting on our balcony, but the door to the cabin is open. It is comfortably mild (76°)with low humidity. There is not a cloud in the sky – OK one, but that’s it.
There is an inversion – an area above us where temperatures rise with height instead of fall. I can tell because I was able to track the smoke trail from the few other ships I have seen over very long distances. Instead of continuing to rise and mix out, they hold steady at one level – a long tail of smoke.
I explored the ship earlier today. Parts of it represent the modern concept of cruising, like the restaurants, casino, theater and pools.
Though there are other areas as well, the pool is the main location for getting a tan. Through the day, there is a prototypical cruise band. They haven’t played “Red, Red Wine” yet… but they will. I did hear Gene Chandler’s “Groovy Situation,” played Reggae style. Very strange.
I have been reading the instructions for some of the evacuation devices. It’s gonna be pretty awful before I slide down a chute or lower myself in a rope harness with a winch!
Say what?
The second problem was much more time consuming and sinister. My friend John has an old Compaq Armada laptop and a pristine copy of Windows 98 from a desktop machine that’s no longer in service. All I had to do was load it up and he’d take it back. This is something I’m glad to do for a friend.