Recent Posts

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1
I'd be content with a service that a good method of detecting actually dangerous content, like virus masquerading as attachments. I can handle the rest myself.

I probably delete about 80% of what i get. Maybe more. But I'd like to make the choice myself. As I'm fond of saying, "The best spam filter in the world is the delete key."
2
Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail all routinely spam block without telling people they're doing it

That's why I don't use them.

They decide who gets what email. Even when most of the time they let the spam though, and block legitimate stuff.

3
FWIW, Yahoo mail has been problematic since the late 90s.  Way back when, probably nine times out of ten if someone had a problem receiving eMails, they were using Yahoo mail.

Of course, from the late 90s to maybe 2010 or so, people still had fax machines and used telephones, so if an eMail didn't go through, you could send a fax instead.  Nowadays, that's not so much of an option.  But Yahoo is still Yahoo . . .
4
Yahoo (don't judge) threw the March 1 email into spam. But it apparently threw  the Feb. 9 one into spam, too. I don't check Yahoo often.


5
I use gmail and get a notification on one thread I follow each day.
However, even if I don't get notifications I visit first thing every morning.
6
AOL, which yeah, I should probably have dumped years ago, randomly throws some in spam and delivers the rest. It does that with a lot of things.

I'm hoping people who are interested will check once a day or so and see what's new. That's a more reliable way of knowing what's going on.
7
I've started getting notifications that gmail and some other sites are now rejecting emails sent out by the forum because this site had passed some failures threshold they have.

2 things seem to have happened lately.

The first was gmail added the forum to a spam list.

The second was a huge increase in spammer activity. This has probably resulted in the failure threshold being crossed, since the majority of the registration attempts never get their emails for various reasons, and thus never go live.

Just now though normal emails being sent out for thread posts just got rejected.

So just be aware that some sites are not passing your forum mail along to you.

Quote
Domain writersanctum.com has exceeded the max defers and failures per hour (5/5 (100%)) allowed. Message discarded.
8
Forum Announcements [Public] / Re: If you decide to delete your account, contact me.
« Last post by Bill Hiatt on February 15, 2024, 09:20:14 AM »
There's always a balance, true.

If it's just a site to display your books, there are limits to what bots can do. If you allow comments, it's easy enough to moderate them and prevent spam manually unless you have huge traffic. An ecommerce site might be trickier, but more because of what hacks against the guts of the site might cause rather than what a frontend user might do.

If I recall, you do your own programming, which gives you the advantage of structuring security how you want. I'm reliant on others, but generally, I have a site that functions well without excessive security routines. The only thing that irks me a little is that when CloudFlare updated recently, I find myself verifying I'm a human every time. It's just a checkbox, but still, I could probably do without. But if I wanted to, I could lower the security there and rely on my other precautions (like WordFence on the site itself). So far, my legit traffic hasn't dwindled.
9
Once the company clamped down, all was well. But it illustrates that uncontrolled sites get flooded very quickly.

The challenge is blocking spam while not terribly inconveniencing legitimate users.  There are some sites I don't/can't use anymore because I can't get past their anti-spam procedures.  They probably don't miss me.  But, whether I am building a site for eCommerce or for my books, I don't want a single legitimate user to slip away.  I'd rather get some spam than block a real person from contacting me or making a purchase.
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Forum Announcements [Public] / Re: If you decide to delete your account, contact me.
« Last post by Bill Hiatt on February 15, 2024, 03:51:25 AM »
Unfortunately, the internet has long been a place where bots will try to create accounts anywhere there's a space, just in case the account can become a way to propagate spam.

When I was still teaching, I had an problem with a company providing supplemental classroom websites. It forgot to activate the anti-spam precautions. So instead of just having my students sign up (which would have been about 120 people at the time, I woke up one morning to find I had over a thousand "people" signed up. The bots had no knowledge of geography and just put together random locations on the signup, so that someone might claim to be located in Las Vegas, Nigeria or Istanbul, Finland. Once the company clamped down, all was well. But it illustrates that uncontrolled sites get flooded very quickly.
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