Daily Cup of Tech

It has now been ten days since the beginning of The Spambox Experiment and I thought that I would provide you with a bit of an update.

It only took one day for the first piece of spam to find its way into my inbox. A wonderful offer from one Mr. Tanzo offering me a wonderful offer to give me a portion of the money that he needs to get out of his country if I am willing to give him my bank account information so that he can borrow it for a while!

As you can see from this graph, there hasn’t been a massive deluge of e-mail coming into this e-mail box.  In fact, it even looks like some of the spammers took some time off for Easter!  I always suspected they were a religious bunch! (Not really!)

But, there seems to have been a bit of a spike on April 15th.  When I looked at these e-mails, they were all in French.  It seems like someone decided to sign this e-mail address up for a couple of newsletters and they were getting sent to me for confirmation.

I also thought that it would be interesting to see what domain names the e-mails were coming from.  This was the result:

Not surprising to see some Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts in there but it is obvious that spammers are using real e-mail addresses as well from real domains.

I also checked into the type of spam that I was receiving.  It broke up into three very clear categories:

I think that it will be interesting to see how these graphs continue to evolve over time.  I think the newsletter things is a bit of an anomoly and will very quickly become a very small and statistically insignificant amount.

I also think that we are going to see the majority of the sending domains to fall into the free w-mail account status (Gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc.).

I’ll keep you posted as things progress.

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Everyone hates spam.  It wastes your time.  It takes up your bandwidth.  It annoys us by trying to sell us products we don’t want.  And I want to fill my inbox with it!

That’s right!  You read that correctly!  I want spam!  Essentially, I want to find out what find out more about the type of spam that is out there these days.  Who is sending it.  Where it is coming from.  Tactics they are using to get into your inbox. All kinds of stuff.

So, here is what I’ve done.  I have created new e-mail account and I will be posting that e-mail address once and only once.  I will then monitor my new inbox to see what comes in.

I ask that anyone who reads this post to not copy the e-mail address or send e-mail to it.  This will skew the results.

So, here goes!  All spammers!  Please send as much spam as possible to spambox@dailycupoftech.com!

I’ll keep you posted as things progress.

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A you may have read in the past, I have been a big fan of temporary e-mail addresses.  These are e-mail addresses that you can enter into a webpage and if they spam the website, who cares because you have already gotten the information that you need and the e-mails that go to the mailbox are automatically dumped after a period of time.

But, I knew it was only a matter of time before a number of these websites got smart to this type of thing.  For example, if you were to enter a Mailinator e-mail address into an Aweber form, it would be rejected.  And this is not limited to temporary accounts, either.  Many free e-mail accounts like Hotmail and Gmail are all starting to be banned from these places as well.  So what is a tech savvy person to do if they don’t want their e-mail to  get spammed?  The answer is to create your own custom temporary e-mail address!

Step 0: Get Your Own Domain Name

This this is not a critical step, it sure makes things easier.  And with domain names so cheap these days (I’ve gotten them for as little as US$2 per year), there is little stopping you from having your own domain name.  Many of you already have your own domain so you will not have to do this.

If you do need to purchase a domain name, I generally recommend GoDaddy.

Step 1: Determine Your Temporary E-Mail Provider and Address

There is no shortage of temporary e-mail providers.  A simple Google search will provide you with a long list of companies that will allow you to create a disposable e-mail address.  Remember this e-mail address.

Step 2: Create An E-mail Forwarder on Your Domain

Next, create an e-mail forwarder on your domain that points to the temporary e-mail address.  You could use something like spamstopper@yourdomainname.com and forward it to spamstopper@mailinator.com.

Step 3: Use Your New Custom Temporary E-Mail Address

Now, whenever you need to provide an e-mail address on the web and the page looks a bit questionable, you can give your custom temporary e-mail address and then check the website for your e-mail.

Bonus Step 4: Set Up An Alias in Roboforms

If you really want to speed up getting that newsletter, you can create an alias at Fake Name Generator and then enter the information along with your new custom temporary e-mail address so that whenever you need to provide information, Robocopy will quickly fill in all of your fake information along with your custom temporary e-mail address.

If you don’t have roboforms, I have made arrangements for Daily Cup of Tech readers to get a copy for free.  Just download, install, and go.

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I regularly use Google Apps to handle my e-mail for multiple domains.  But, as of January 14th, things have gotten a bit more difficult.

You can find a lot of links on Google to their premium edition of Google apps.  Unfortunately, it costs $50 per user per year.  So, your organization of 50 people will cost you $2500 per year.  But, if you can find Google Apps Standard Edition (and you don’t mind a couple of ads), you could get pretty much the same thing for free.  If only you could find it!

Well, to make your life easier, I am providing you with a direct link to sign up for a Google APps Standard Edition.  It is available at http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new.

For those of you unfamiliar with Google Apps Standard Edition, here is what you get:

• Gmail and Google Calendar to help businesses save money and keep employees connected. Mobile support and IMAP are included.
• Google Docs and Google Sites to enhance your company’s traditional
  productivity software and help employees share information efficiently.
• Free, ad-supported, up to 50 user accounts and 7.287689 GB / account
• 10 GB shared storage for Google Docs and Sites
• Self-serve online support
  

Enjoy your new account!

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Johnny’s wife appears to have been a bit too helpful:

I was wondering if you knew of any kind of program that would give the extensions of video files. I was in the process of backing up all my dvd’s onto my home server and the wife thought the files would be prettier with out extensions and instead of hiding the extensions she went ahead and deleted them.. problem is that although a majority were .avi’s not all were and I dont know what they were.. so I was wondering if there was a program that would go through and read the headers and tell me what extension should follow the name. Thanks for any help at all.

Johnny

Well, Johnny, there may be a quick answer to your problem. The GSpot codec information appliance (don’t look at me, I didn’t name it) is an excellent tool to determine a whole pile of things about your video files. Simply download the latest version of the application, extract the zipped file and run the executable file.  Then, open the video files in question using GSpot and the information that you are looking for is in the Container box on the left side.

As you can see from the screen shot above, this is a DivX encoded file in an AVI container.  So the extension would be AVI.

Hope this helps, Johnny.

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