Piotr Przemyslaw Karwasz

Last month come up with 2 pleasant surprises:

• The percentage of visitors of my site that use Microsoft Internet Explorer dropped from 60% up to 46.2%, thus passed below the 50% barrier.

• As a consequence of the first point I am seriously considering using the scripts of Explorer Destroyer to achieve the goal of less than 25% of IE users on my site.

The script is still a little bit too intrusive and I don’t want in any way make the Web surfing unpleasant for those users who freely chose to use IE: they have as much right to use IE as I have to use Firefox. However I would like to “rescue” those newbies that doesn’t know that there are other explorers beyond IE and I really don’t like to twitch my pages in order to work around IE’s bugs.

To learn (or better to learn again, since I already took a few Japanese lessons, before being obliged to quit for lack of time) is on my “tomorrow I begin” list since at least six months, but I was too lazy to do it.

So I decided to finally find a Japanese teacher in Nancy . Hopefully I will be able to assist to lessons in my University , but I wouldn’t regret to spend a couple of hundred of euros to learn this beautiful language (and if I must pay, I am more motivated :-) ).

Three months ago I ended the contract with my hosting provider (they really pissed me off), so I decided to put a server in my appartement. I took a while before I was able to buy a new desktop , because I was waiting for my Ph.D. grant to arrive. But it was worth the shot: since then I don’t have spam anymore.

I use exim4 as the mail server with the SA-Exim plugin and since sa-exim works at MTA level, spammers cannot tell if their spam was filtered or the mailbox doesn’t exist, so the address is progressively deleted from the spam lists (well, actually they could know, since “User uknown” is rejected after the RCPT command, while the spam is rejected after DATA. Hopefully not all spambots are so smart: some of them are even so dumb as to send commands before the server has time to answer and this fact is a breach of SMTP protocol and implies the shutdown of the connection).

Another hack I can use now (and I couldn’t with my previous ISP) is to use unique e-mail addresses . Obviously a spammer can steal a user+unique_id@example.org address and try to send spam to user@example.org. The countermeasure to this behaviour would be to invalidate all user@example.org addresses and accept mail only for user+unique_id@example.org (and put the list of acceptable unique_id into users home directories).