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I wish there was a reminder to take my morning medicine on my desktop.Thats the first thing i see in the morning.A picture of a huge “Take Your Medicine” staring me in the face will get my attention.( I Hope)

That’s easy in Windows (probably in Mac OSX too, but I don’t know that OS), provided two conditions are met:
1. you power up (cold boot) or restart (hot boot) your computer every day,
2. “Windows Photo Viewer” is the default application to open *.jpg graphic files.

How to proceed:

1. With your graphic application (Paint,The Gimp, Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop Pro or whatever you prefer) you design an image showing the warning you desire, a large bold-faced text or a drawing of a raised finger or a photo of a scantily clad nurse or whatever grabs your attention. Save it as a jpg-file in a folder of your choice.

2. Navigate to your Startup folder.

3. In your Startup folder create a shortcut to the jpg-file you just saved and give it a self-explanatory name.

That’s it. Each and every time you cold boot or restart you machine, the “Windows Photo Viewer” with your warning graphic will appear on your desktop.

OTOH, if your machine “sleeps” or “hibernates” at night, then this little trick will only work if you create an entry in the Task Scheduler.

… Like the gentleman who doesn’t lean out of windows, I use K9 and like it a lot. …

Hi Marp,

Nice to finally have someone confirm K9’s usefulness.

As for UNsubscribing, that seems to work with European companies and organisations. But I’m getting unsolicited advertising from a Chinese manufacturing company. Their mails don’t have an unsubscribe link and their website has a flaming red WOT score. Moreover, if I were to send a cease & desist E-mail, who’s to say their employees would read and understand English, let alone comply? What to do in such a case?

I suspect the easiest solution is to just continue to have K9 filter and divert their spam.

BTW. I only avoid leaning out of *train* windows!

… I just need to get my head together and remember to take my meds the first thing in the morning. …

There’s also coffee cups that play a tune when you lift them off the table …
or a sticky note on the door of the head …

… an Audio reminder, like “have you taken your med’s today?” …

29551-IDEA Maybe your telephone operator has a daily recurring wake up call service, maybe even for free.

Or google for automatic wake up call (free). 29550-callme (I’ve had several hits in the US)

… Hope this helps.

Not one bit, sorry.
It has all been said or refuted in previous posts in this thread. Please read them again.

… (I use MailWasher) to delete the rubbish before it is downloaded.

That used to be an issue in the days of 56 kbps (or less) dial-up and 1 GB (or less) hard disk drives (1996).

But now with 50 mbps bandwith and terabyte HDDs it hardly matters. Whether you delete spam on the server with Mailwasher or K9, or through webmail or locally after downloading, makes very little difference, considering the fact that spam is rarely larger than 100 KB or so and usually between 1 and 25 KB.

Remember that to read the mail directly on the server you have to actually download it first to a temporary cache. How else could you possibly read it?

… I do enjoy many of the inventive hoax emails & so regularly browse the spam box for a laugh.

At first this guy wasn’t laughing, but I guess he is now.

… With MailWasher you can bounce the message back to the sender (even if it looks like you sent it to yourself) so it looks like it was sent to a bad e-mail address. …

I would recommend against using the Mailwasher bounce feature.
That bounce is NOT sent by a mailserver but *by your machine*, just like a regular E-mail. The difference is visible in the headers where the IP-addresses are shown.

A Mailwash bounce actually confirms the validity of your address. NOT

Here is why (an old post but still applicable, I think).

Here are some statistics about spam, from not so long ago (15 DEC 2009).

You can read much more about Mailwasher and spam in general in a GRC newsgroup (Steve Gibson’s newsgroups server) (access and optional registration are free), going back to 2002:
The GRC’s NNTP server is: news.grc.com
The newsgroup is: grc.spam

Edit: When I sent this post I hadn’t yet seen the one immediately above. :blush:

… Now, I use only GMail, where they have a pretty good Spam Filter, and I can add email addresses to the list of spammers, in the Filters section. …

I use 2 Gmail + 1 AOL addresses. …

DrWho (#8 above) has the ticket: GMail has an excellent filter (what used to be Postini, I believe) …

A bit off topic, sorry.

Granted that Gmail blocks spam very well. I don’t doubt that.

But I don’t fully trust Google to tracelessly erase from their mail-server the mails I want deleted.

I could of course encrypt my outgoing Gmails but that would be a hassle for recipients and my received Gmails would still be in the clear.

… use a good server based filter (I use MailWasher) to delete the rubbish before it is downloaded.

I beg to differ.

Mailwasher (either Free or Pro) is NOT server-side. It is installed locally on *your* computer.

K9 vs Mailwasher Pro:
K9 is free, but it only works with pop3 mail.

K9 vs Mailwasher Free:
K9 handles multiple mailboxes and adresses, it has no ads or banners, it needs no updates at all; it too can instruct your mail-server to delete the mails you select.

BTW. SpamAssassin is a server-side spamfilter.

…
Never use TO: when sending to more than one person….. always use BCC: for safety.
…

For fifteen years now I’ve been telling family, friends and acquaintances to do that. :rolleyes:

And also, before sending them on, to delete address lists in forwarded mails which are eagerly mined for addresses by spam-trojans.

It’s been a fruitless and exasperating effort, except with a very few willing-to-learn people.

Thanks guys for your replies.

Concerning my questions in my OP, I conclude that trying to take down actual spammers is extremely complex and would require excessively much time and effort for very little result. So I’ll just continue to rely on my ISP’s server-side filter and my own local K9 anti-spam proxy, which together manage quite well, considering that only two or three spams per week reach my Inbox.

As for advice on how to limit/avoid spam, I already know almost all the tricks you recommend and even one more.

If a (shady) site you don’t fully trust requires a valid E-mail address before granting your request (download or purchase or forum-subscription), don’t hand it over but use 10 Minute Mail instead. There are many more of those mentioned at moreofit.com

I assume you mean anti-spam software and NOT spam-sending software? :):

For years, from Windows 98 over XP, Vista and now Windows 7 HP SP1 (32bit), I’ve had very good and reliable service from the free K9 spam-filter. It certainly never overtaxed my old Pentium 133 MHz.
K9 worked superbly well with Outlook Express and continues to do so with Thunderbird (all versions).

But …

K9 is for standard POP3 email accounts only. It does not support IMAP nor does it support Hotmail, AOL or any other kind of webmail type systems. It does not natively support SSL or secure authentication.

Please do not confuse my K9 application with the comparatively recent K-9 Mail app for the Android operating system.

http://keir.net/k9.html

Dear Susan,

You wondered:

Patching .NET — What would Steve do?

With the passing of one of the technology industry’s leading lights, I ask for a bit of indulgence — in some timely speculation. Namely, if Steve Jobs had been in charge of Windows patching, what would he have done? How would it be handled?

But I wonder:
Why didn’t you ask him while he was alive? Or would he have kicked you?

Windows 7 HP SP1
+ MVPS HOSTS file

In Fred Langa’s article “How do ‘protected’ systems become infected?” he gives a link to a Microsoft page with a list of reliable anti-virus software vendors.

I noticed that all the AV-vendor links start with http: //view. atdmt. com (without the spaces of course). But those links on Microsoft’s page don’t work for me, because view.atdmt.com is blocked by an entry in my HOSTS file.

I wonder why view.atdmt.com is included in the MVPS HOSTS file?

Unblocking is trivial of course, but is there any risk if I do?

On 27 Sept 2011, I received this reply from Mike Burgess:

That entry is a 3rd party advertising tracker owned by Microsoft … clicking those links will set several 3rd party Cookies that will track and record your movements, etc..

So disabling that entry will also affect other sites, again setting you up to be tracked or displaying other 3rd party advertisements …

Mike Burgess
Microsoft MVP – Consumer Security
“There’s no place like 127.0.0.1”
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

So if I understand correctly, it suffices to configure Internet Explorer and Firefox to refuse 3rd party cookies. Which has always been my browsers’ setting.

So I’m good even if I remove that particular HOSTS entry.
Right?