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Sieving through spam and virus alerts
I am sure that I'm not the only one who has to go through the mind-numbing exercise of deleting spam, virus alerts, and other junk e-mails everytime I check my Outlook Express and webmails.
Heaven knows why I keep getting "p----s enlargement" e-mails. Doesn't the sender know that I am female and that I don't own such a thing? Even if I do, I would be content with the knowledge that "size isn't everything." And I'm not about to forward such emails to my male friends either.
Same goes for viagra e-mails. The closest thing to viagra in my life is putting amplification on a classical guitar so that I can hear it when I play the piano. Amplification and page turners are essential for my upcoming concert this Sunday. And if viagra can help in any way, I'd be the first to subscribe to it.
If viagra isn't medicinal enough, there are hoards of e-mails on other pharmaceutical solutions. "Generic drugs, Vicodin, Xanax, Hydrocodone --- buy them all online." For someone who doesn't even take vitamins, why in the world would I want to buy medicine online? Any medicine for that matter!
On the subject of health, I don't know where these senders get the idea that I need diet pills or a powerful weight loss programme. Do I look like I need to go on a diet? Visit my photo album and let me know. By following a virtually vegetarian diet along with training for a future marathon, I am suffering from hunger pains, if anything!
Thankfully, some spams are intelligent enough to have relevant subject fields that I can check and delete at a glance. But all of them are targetted to the wrong person - me!!
"All cars qualify for our warranty protection" -- I sold my beloved red convertible Nissan 240SX SE in Houston, Texas the day before I had to fly back to London. I sold my black Celica years ago. I don't own a sports car anymore! Instead, I prefer to be chauffeured nowadays.
"Get your university diploma!" Goodness, gracious! How many degrees must I get before I am satisifed?
Ever heard of the reverse spam? That's when senders make up email addresses for themselves. And when their emails get returned, it goes to the fake email addresses. People are using this evil technique on my websites. Yep! They are making up email addresses using bonjournal.com as the domain name. Yuck!! I'll have to exercise more rigour in my e-mail management!
Finally, there's the awful virus alert email (below). I never know what the original emails contain, whether they are genuine or not. There's never anything "below" or "attached." I can only trust that my webhost knows what he's doing. I get a lot of these.
Subject: VIRUS ALERT: W32/Netsky.Q@mm
(English version below)
Você recebeu uma mensagem contendo vírus. Para sua segurança, essa
mensagem foi eliminada do sistema. Maiores informações sobre a origem
e o assunto da mensagem original estão disponíveis nos cabeçalhos
abaixo:
You have received a message with a virus. For your security, this
message was removed from the system. More information about the origin
and subject of the original message can be seen in the headers below:
I highly doubt that my spammers read this journal entry. If they did,
they will be too smart to spam for a living.
4 June 2004 Friday
Related entries & links:
Victim of spam
Spam: weapons of mass disruption
Return to sender
Junk mail
Three days of e-mails
A cluttered life of distractions and chaos
Reflection:
Today is the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre in China. My father forwarded me a 2nd June 2004 New York Times article by NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF who had witnessed the event. He wrote:
It's often said that an impoverished, poorly educated, agrarian country like China cannot sustain democracy. Yet my most powerful memory of that night 15 years ago is of the peasants who had come to Beijing to work as rickshaw drivers.
During each lull in the firing, we could see the injured, caught in a no-man's-land between us and the troops. We wanted to rescue them but didn't have the guts. While most of us in the crowd cowered and sought cover, it was those uneducated rickshaw drivers who pedaled out directly toward the troops to pick up the bodies of the dead and wounded.
Some of the rickshaw drivers were shot, but the rest saved many, many lives that night, rushing the wounded to hospitals as tears streamed down their cheeks. It would be churlish to point out that such people are ill-prepared for democracy, when they risked their lives for it.
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