Auditions Are Good!

I’m very pleased to report that One-Act Auditions went over quite well. Not the best turnout I’ve seen, but there were new faces in the crowd, and that’s always a Good Thing as far as I’m concerned. It at least shows some interest amongst those not previously involved.

I was also pleased to learn that at least a few of the auditioners for One-Act were inspired by either first-hand involvement or attendance at the Three-Act this fall, which really supports my philosophy that the more people see, the more they’ll enjoy participating, perhaps.

This weekend was a time to do some research and thought as to how I should cast the production, and it’s always a tough decision when you’ll have to turn people away. One of my primary goals as the director is to involve as many people as possible while maintaining control and making it all good. In some instances, it means that some students may only get one chance in their high school careers to be involved with a production like this (touring/competition), but at least there was that chance… It also allows the cast/crew to not always be populated by the same faces and therefore become somewhat stagnant.

I’m all about the experience, even if it’s only a one-time thing. That, to me, is more important than repeated experience when it comes to involving the most people over a period of time.

And What About SPAM?

Well, this isn’t the Monty Python Repository, but SPAM is definitely in the air. For the last six-nine months, I’ve been plagued with ungodly amounts of the stuff in my inbox. Quite frankly, it’s become such a problem that I literally have to check my email once a day for fear of being completely enveloped in the stuff. On a “Bad Day,” my inbox could receive as many as 500 of these messages. On an average, usually 200-300. On a good day, 100. Over the course of 24 hours. You do the math…

Part of the problem which compounds it are the aliases I use @ mzonline.com. This I’ve done for years as a preliminary filter. Certain things go to certain addresses. They all come to the same inbox, but it’s an easy way I can filter my email with my client (by simple pattern-matching of ‘to’ addresses). But, as the case was for me, I put way too many of these out in the public for too long (over the last seven years), and email-harvesting robots have overtaken them.

I decided to combat the problem. For several months, I’ve been working on it. Early in the year, I decided to try something I’d read about. Take as many references to email addresses off of webpages as possible. Since I’ve pretty much moved most of my website material to the TWiki, this task was trivial. For the email addresses remaining, I’ve added the SPAM padding (which adds STOPSPAM in the address…and requires it to be removed for legitimate mail sending)…which tells those harvestors bad information and therefore saves me time.

The downside: this could take a long time to go into effect. But I let it go anyway…just for grins.

In the meantime I’ve also moved to (and relied heavily upon) more form-based email sending. It offers me much more control over the delivery address (an ‘unknown’ alias), layout of email, and other ‘standardized’ stuff which allows me to filter it more productively and therefore get to it quicker than by scrolling through the other SPAM (e.g. my mail program automatically highlights these messages as HIGH priority and such). It’s also relatively easy to implement and still allows me to be contacted initially by anyone without truly revealing an address. These are all things I like.

So, bringing us up to speed, over the last year or so, I’ve removed most references to stock email addresses on my websites, and instead provided forms to allow people to contact me. All this in the hopes it’ll slow down my SPAM received. I’d also looked into (and am still planning on purchasing, probably after the Christmas season) Norton AntiSpam 2004 or some other sort of product.

WRONG!

While I will agree that this tactic works in preventing future harvests, it does very little for those existing. Sadly, since August I’ve not had a lot of time to really study the mail I got and how it’s related to my personal SPAM problem. Until now.

Now, up until about a year ago or so (I want to say it was perhaps even around our wedding time a year and a half ago), I had server-side measures in place for some SPAM. To not go into gory detail but be precise, I was blocking certain domains, aliases, and so forth. That helped to some degree…but then again at the time I wasn’t receiving nearly as much junk. My guess is that in the last two years, my incoming junk mail has increased by 1000%. No kidding. Anyway, something with the mailserver was broken (or one of my files was corrupted), and I was losing legitimate email from domains I’d not blocked, etc. It was ugly. So, I’d removed those measures…

Now it was time to re-think the process. Some server-side software had changed in the meantime since this happened, so while doing some research, I decided to re-try the alias blocking. Only thing was…I needed to know which aliases to block, which was going to take some research (but not much since I did get 400 junk messages in a two-day period). It didn’t take me long to realize that over 75% of my junk mail was coming to address aliases that I’d not used for over two years!

There were actually a series of five aliases that I’d used when I’d had a more ‘traditional’ Python website (what’s now the Repository), when I had PythonMUX, and when I’d registered at eBay (a legitimate, currently-used (although I use eBay very little any more)) years ago. I was somewhat surprised, but really more shocked that not even my primary alias (which I’ve used for now seven and a half years) gets as much SPAM as these random aliases.

So, after changing my eBay address to a new alias, it was time to do some /dev/bounce-ing. After taking about 10 minutes to really set up the alias file with the new information with which I was armed, I decided to test it out. My test emails arrived (or didn’t) as I’d expected. Good. Now for the real test…overnight.

This morning I awoke and checked my email prior to leaving for work. ONLY 36 messages overnight!!!

It would seem as though the experiment worked! Typically in an overnight period, I’d receive about 150 junk messages, and this morning only received 36, 30 of which were actually unwanted. This is absolutely phenomenal to me. So I went to work, expecting the same result later.

Upon my arrival home from work, I only had 30 messages awaiting, about 27 of which were unwanted. Here again, my daily total thus far is 66. Over the past month, my average Sunday SPAM by this time would be on the order of 260. This is a reduction of approximately 75%! And I never have to see it (or download it)! I am quite tickled by this result and finally can see light at the end of my SPAM-related tunnel.

The real test will be a weekday run. But, if my weekend trial is any sort of indicator, I’m expecting positive results.

In the meantime (since Saturday evening when I worked on all of this stuff), I’ve removed my personal mail client SPAM filters (ones I’d manually set up to catch some of it) in hopes that I will re-write newer, possibly more efficient filters later. Part of my real complaint about all the SPAM was that my mail client had about 25 individual filters, each with about 10 different rules, to check each message while downloading. That’s about 250 pattern-matching checks per message, and the time that takes adds up…

So, sometime tomorrow I’m going to sit down with paper and pen…and make notes of the SPAM that I’m still receiving…and write up some generic filters for what SPAM remains. That should take care of about 90% of what SPAM I used to directly receive…and we’ll see about AntiSpam after the first of the year.

Score one for Matt, No More for the SPAM.

And if you read all of this, I’ll give you my moral of the story:

1. Be cautious of where you put your email address(es) (and how many times they’re out) on webpages.
2. Use SPAM padding (e.g. user @ companySTOPSPAM.com) where appropriate.
3. Use form-based initial inquiries for legitimate initial email (assuming you’ve taken the proper steps to ‘secure’ your form processing script as best you can).
4. Never underestimate the power of your mind!
5. NEVER GIVE UP!

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/25/07