Saturday, January 31st

Spam Specialist

Barb complained that there were several incoming emails that were sent but that she never received. I dived into the log files for Exim4 on my mail server and sure enough, there were some emails discarded as spam that should have been legitimate. My ISP has its own spam filter (Bayesian, I presume), but I do a second level of spam filtering and mail sorting on my mail server in Exim4.

I traced the problem to a rule in the Exim4 filter file:

$header_subject: contains cialis or
$message_body: contains cialis or

The problem here is that by default Exim4 rules don't check for word boundaries. So any word with the characters 'cialis' in it would be discarded. It turns out that the emails in question were discussing "specialists". D'oh!


Jim on 01.31.09 @ 01:31 PM ET [link]


Saturday, January 10th

Yellow Line

For those football fans, or technology fans, here's an interesting video on how the NFL's Yellow Line works. Apparently during games there's one guy dedicated to moving the yellow line by moving a slider with a mouse, and another guy dedicated to coming up with a good color match for the field.
Jim on 01.10.09 @ 11:10 AM ET [link]



Email: jim@jimandbarb.DELETETHISPART.net
(please remove the DELETETHISPART before sending me mail!)