By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Junk mail In the past few newsletters, I have complained about all the virus laden emails with sometimes several hundred arriving in one 24 hour period. Well, the viruses are still with me, but the idiotic spam for Viagra, Vicodin, pornography sites, reducing your mortgage, increasing your income, etc. have surpassed the virus-laden messages. It seems like it will never end. As I said in a previous newsletter, at least one member has changed his email address in the hope of missing out on the spam onslaught. Another member says that when he opens his email program on Monday at the office after being away for two days, it takes him an hour to go through and delete all the junk.

A couple of weeks back I checked the catch-all email account at my domain name. It is the one that receives all mail directed to webmaster, admin and any name that doesn’t exist. It had 3,000 plus messages and was taking up 16 MB of space. A check right now showed only 631 such messages. All of this is such a strain on email servers--and our patience.

To make matters worse, now some of us are having our emails rejected by receiving email servers. Using my RoadRunner account, I sent a message to a member at his office. It was bounced back to me saying that the server rejected emails from this address, meaning from RoadRunner. Within a few hours of that, I received an email from another member on RoadRunner wanting to know why four messages she sent to Verison accounts were bounced back with similar messages. I told her that apparently RoadRunner IP addresses, or at least a block of RoadRunner IP addresses, were on somebody’s “don’t accept email from them” list.

And really, that is all it takes. Some guy who doesn’t bathe regularly, detests Microsoft and business in general--not to mention his professed hate of spam--sets himself up as the protector of all, creates a database of IPs from which to not accept emails and offers it to the public, possibly at no charge since he hates business. Apparently RoadRunner is on such a list.

Then, there is the problem of your Inbox being so crowded with messages--200 or more in may case per day--that in deleting what you think is spam, you inadvertently delete something of value. I did that earlier in the week apparently, and it has caused a major problem in rescheduling things for next week now that I know from a phone conversation the contents of that email.

To me, the current email problem is much more of a problem than the unwanted phone solicitations for which we now have a don't call list.

Programming and old photographs Those of you have read my offerings over the years know of many of the things I have placed at my web site, http://www.lamartin.com. One was an ASP search feature and front-end for the Burgert Brothers collection of old Tampa photographs of the Hillsborough/Tampa Public Library. It is at http://www.lamartin.com/burgert/. I have now updated that to a modern Microsoft .Net version at http://www.lamartin.com/dotnet/TampaPhotos.aspx. Here you can browser the photos ordered by date or do a textual search. The difference is that here the results are returned with thumbnails of the images and the speed of the data return (at least for me) is faster than when using the earlier ASP interface I had created. I am finding that .Net makes programming for the web much easier than in the past. To see more examples, go to http://www.lamartin.com/dotnet/. There you can get the latest news, talk with the web psychiatrist, do a cost of living comparison, check the weather and much more. u