Category: Just Saying …

Spent most of the day trying to figure out email problems. And they are mostly caused by our mail filter vendor (Websense, who bought SurfControl). Support for this product, even though we pay mid-5 figures a year for what they call ‘priority support’, is woefully inadequate. You would think that for that price, we’d get better response. All an email gets is an automated response, but no response from the tech support staff.

Well, sometimes you’ll get a response after two weeks that says something like “we’re assuming this matter is closed, since we haven’t heard from you about this issue in a while”. But even an immediate response to that is met with silence.

Even though our support contract doesn’t end until December, I am seriously considering moving to another solution for our email and web filtering. I actually should have pulled that trigger before the last renewal.

Today is the day that you don’t want to believe what you read on the Innertubes … more than usual.

You’ll find lots of allegedly humorous pages trying to fool you. And lots of emails that contain links to malware.

So, be careful out there.

Now, please excuse me while I do a backup to my WORN drive (Write Once, Read Never). Can’t be too careful.

Been working on a vbscript program that checks the update and anti-virus status of a group of computers, storing that info in a nice html file. Almost finished; testing takes about 10 minutes, since it talks to a whole ‘Class C’ IP address range.

And monitoring the anti-spam mail system. There’s a bit more spam that has slipped through our defenses, and it’s difficult to stop those. We’ve been pretty successful in spam filtering in the past.

Our users might be a bit spoiled, though. I get complaints if just a few (under 10) spams slip through each day.We’re blocking 94% of all messages (about 600K a day) as spam. That’s up a bit from the 90% a month ago. Still pretty impressive, though.

And still working on my latest secret money-making web site. Using some free (GPL) software, but there seems to be minimal support of one of the modules I need to use. I may have to delve deeper in the PHP code to fix things.

It’s a slow Friday.

But I found a great article on an important issue – flatulence !

http://bodyodd.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/03/19/786305.aspx

As I get older, I find that some of the things I used to enjoy eating can cause intestinal distress, along with the accompanying uncomfortable discharges. So I found the article fascinating, along with the comments at the end.

Especially the one that proves that global warming is caused by flatulence.

So I recommend that you read the article.

And I’ll go take my medication now.

Did you get a bit more spam email this weekend than normal? I did at the office…and users complained a bit.

It was what I call a ‘zero-day spam attack’. It’s explained over in my “Security Dawg” blog here: http://www.securitydawg.com/2008/03/zero-day-spam-attack.html .

In the meantime, a bit of hand-holding for the users, who are probably spoiled by the overall effectiveness of the spam blocking at the office. We block about 500K (out of 550K) messages a day as spam. A few do get through, but overall we are quite effective at blocking spam.

Not as effective as Gmail, though. I hardly ever see spam in the “In” folder in my Gmail account. The above link explains my theory about that.

So, tomorrow is Leap Day.

Shouldn’t you have some special plans? A day off with the kids or spouse? A special road trip?

It should be something out of the ordinary. After all, it only happens once every four years.

Got plans?