I was an ordinary helpdesk drone and I had access to all of my customers e-mails. I worked for a large UK DSL ISP.
Infact, I would semi-regularly have customers phoning me up asking me to read out their e-mails, as if I was some sort of human "speaking clock".
"Do I have any e-mails from 'sonnyjim'? Oh, could you read it out to me? See, I'm not at my computer and sonnyjim is my son who's in Australia..."
I would do so if I was happy with the customers identity.
I don't recall anyone ever abusing this facility. From what I saw, the contents of every mailbox I went into wouldn't make riveting reading - it's not all "carry on" affairs in there. We had better things to do, like browsing BBC news and reading Slashdot.
Last year's Blizzcon was tremendously popular. So much so that their servers were unable to handle the strain of fans competing for 15,000 available tickets. This year, Blizzard was more prepared; they made an additional 5,000 tickets available and set up a queue so that the transaction servers weren't overwhelmed. CEO Mike Morhaime said during the keynote address that if you weren't able to get into the queue within 30 seconds of its opening, the tickets were sold out before your turn came. Tens of thousands more chose to order the pay-per-view coverage, demonstrating the extraordinary enthusiasm felt for Blizzard's games. Their presentations didn't disappoint. Read on for details on the status of StarCraft II, Diablo III, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and the new Battle.net. It's divided into sections by game in case you're only interested in one or two of them.
Agreed, I'd much rather have a decent 22"+ plus LCD monitor than a fancy keyboard/mouse, the same goes for desk/chair also.
But, as soon as I saw Opiates on this list, it instantly got my vote, sorry 8-)
haha, so every time you close the lid on your laptop you have to carefully check it to make sure nothing's running that might disrupt the process? and you're happy with doing that?
you can't deny that the behaviour there is broken.
What's the problem with rejecting the SMTP session, with the error displaying the SMTP error code along with your phone number/error message in it?
Indeed, a lot of spam to my mail server comes from China, Korea, or India.
I see the occasional spam come from the USA, but it's a very small amount. Same with Canada.
The hostnames I often see seem to belong to residential addresses - DSL connections etc. It seems a damn botnet is responsible for sending all the "Acai berry" and Viagra/Cialis spams to my domain.
I don't shitcan the mails from "bad" countries outright, but I do increase the "weight" / probability it might be spam.
I've also whitelisted Britain, so no e-mail coming from UK IP addresses will get filtered (I am based in the UK)
Setting this up on an SMTP proxy box running ASSP took a day, and has reduced spam on my network by 90-95% - it's a no brainer, really.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce