Saturday, February 04, 2006
Lesson On Emailing ...
I'd like to say that my day started off perfect. Spent two hours with my daughter and had an awesome time ... but, what happened when I got home ... I had to go through over 10,000 emails .. ?? Why ... well, because I'm dumb enough to have agreed to be a server admin on a server where the programmers don't know enough about programming and how this wonderful world of ours works.
Well, lets start with the basics, so I don't lose everyone right away. You remember when you first got an email account and everyone is forwarding all those awesome jokes and the "this really works" emails to you ... and, in turn, you forward them to someone else. If you feel the need to bombard people with these rediculous emails, be smart about it. There is a reason that after a couple days of doing this that you start to get 1000's of spam messages. Somewhere down the line, someone went through your one of these forwards and picked through all the emails addresses and then put them on a mailling list.
... so, how do you protect yourself if you insist on forward this "crap" to other people? Put their email address in the BCC section and just send the message back to yourself ... why does this work? well, BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy ... this means that there is know way to know who else these emails were sent to because the addresses aren't attached to the message in any way. There is no way for even the brightest hacker to figure it out because it simply doesn't exist. To step it up a notch, you can even be nice to your friends that sent the message to you and delete all the email address that are included in the message as well ... do your part to clean up the internet, please!
Now, on to my issue. A similar mistake that people do is either put their own email address on the website or build a poor contact form. Now, the first issue doesn't directly affect me except that the client will bitch and complain that they are getting so much SPAM, and I will say "i told you not to do that" ... or "i'm sorry no one told you any better". However, the poorly built form apparently does affect me ... why? because every email that doesn't find a proper recipient gets bounced back to the server admin ... that's me! So, how do we fix this? Hire someone who knows what they hell they are doing. A form that doesn't do any checks for valid information or where the information is coming from can easily be hijacked and used as their own personal mail server - leaving me to clean up their mess ... my day has now been about getting those 10,000+ emails out of my mail box and sealing up the hole that someone created ... not my job, but I'd rather fix it then continue to get these emails.
... and breath.... that's my rant for today.
Well, lets start with the basics, so I don't lose everyone right away. You remember when you first got an email account and everyone is forwarding all those awesome jokes and the "this really works" emails to you ... and, in turn, you forward them to someone else. If you feel the need to bombard people with these rediculous emails, be smart about it. There is a reason that after a couple days of doing this that you start to get 1000's of spam messages. Somewhere down the line, someone went through your one of these forwards and picked through all the emails addresses and then put them on a mailling list.
... so, how do you protect yourself if you insist on forward this "crap" to other people? Put their email address in the BCC section and just send the message back to yourself ... why does this work? well, BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy ... this means that there is know way to know who else these emails were sent to because the addresses aren't attached to the message in any way. There is no way for even the brightest hacker to figure it out because it simply doesn't exist. To step it up a notch, you can even be nice to your friends that sent the message to you and delete all the email address that are included in the message as well ... do your part to clean up the internet, please!
Now, on to my issue. A similar mistake that people do is either put their own email address on the website or build a poor contact form. Now, the first issue doesn't directly affect me except that the client will bitch and complain that they are getting so much SPAM, and I will say "i told you not to do that" ... or "i'm sorry no one told you any better". However, the poorly built form apparently does affect me ... why? because every email that doesn't find a proper recipient gets bounced back to the server admin ... that's me! So, how do we fix this? Hire someone who knows what they hell they are doing. A form that doesn't do any checks for valid information or where the information is coming from can easily be hijacked and used as their own personal mail server - leaving me to clean up their mess ... my day has now been about getting those 10,000+ emails out of my mail box and sealing up the hole that someone created ... not my job, but I'd rather fix it then continue to get these emails.
... and breath.... that's my rant for today.
# posted by AllCdnBoy @ 12:26 PM 
