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How Apple’s Spam Filter Stacks Up

I won’t say I don’t receive pitches for the occasional mortgage discount or Vegas vacation, the latest performance-enhancing elixir or anatomical wonder pills. In general, though, I’ve had good results with a built-in spam stopper in Apple’s Mail program, which I’ve used daily since it was released with the Jaguar update of OS X last year. [osOpinion]

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Microsoft takes spam plan to Washington

Chairman Bill Gates writes a letter advocating a combination of law and self-regulation by the industry to stop unwanted e-mail. [CNET News.com Entertainment & Media]

First – here’s a link to the Bill Gates Letter.

While the ADV subject line would be easy to filter for unsolicited emails, it would also completely kill any and all attempts for legit acquisition marketing. The average consumer does not truly understand how their name might be sold or traded through a list broker, nor do they really want to.

If, as a marketer we decide to purchase a list of likely candidate (legally of course), we might now expect to get an extremely low response rate which in effect would kill that aspect of marketing. Customer communications seem easy to maintain with this proposed regulation, but unless someone devises a new way for “customer introduction marketing” a new message from a third party seems to be something that will automatically be filtered to junk.

As someone who gets a great deal of spam – 101 messages since I left the office at 7pm last night, I can certainly appreciate wanting it to go away, and for penalties for those who are blatant abusers. I just don’t see why a solid filter can’t be deployed that can work on a massive level. My use of POPFile has literally gotten 100 of the 101 messages in the last 13 hours. I think that is pretty amazing, and something many others would get a great deal of use from. We just need it installed at the server level, not the user level since it is way to complex a system for mass adoption.

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Time Warner Cable dials in phone service

Things are getting extremely competitive with integrated service offerings for telco… Cable vs. DSL is a serious game. Seems the Cable guys have an advantage, since coax can carry more data and it can handle phone. DSL providers can not offer TV – at least not today. Just for comparison… we recently signed up for the AT&T One Rate in NYC which is unlimited local, regional and domestic LD all for $55/mo. Time Warner is rolling out the same package for $40/mo.

AOL’s Time Warner Cable is expected to announce Thursday it has begun selling unlimited local, in-state and domestic long distance telephone service to subscribers.

Time Warner Cable’s “Digital Phone” will cost $40 a month and be available only in the Portland, Maine, area. Time Warner’s trial offering is similar to experiments with telephone services from rival cable providers Comcast Cable Communications and Cablevision Systems.

[CNET News.com Communications]

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BusinessWeek: Summer of Mac?

Alex Salkever suggests that this may be the Summer of Mac in his latest Byte of the Apple column for BusinessWeek Online. Salkever’s supposition comes from a convergence of events that he sees as important to Apple’s future — and its stock prices. He suggests that this summer may be one of Apple’s “best seasons in a long time,” in fact. [MacCentral]

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Sneak peek at AOL 9.0 client

Looks like a hybrid of MSN and Mac OSX on steroids…

America Online upgrades and releases a new client about once a year. AOL 9.0 is scheduled for release this Fall, and screenshots are beginning to leak to sites like Neowin. Former AOL exec turned blogger Susan Mernit posts this play-by-play:

1) Information management–New emphasis on suitcase and my stuff: Two items on the very top suggest AOL is going to integrate more with desktop tools and information management–a File command on far left, and as little suitcase icon at far right.

2) Downplaying channel content–No more channel bar on Welcome Screen. Does anyone go to all that content buried in the bar? AOLers have long discussed whether the real estate and the clickthrough for the left nave mar are merited–guess the answer is in these 9.0 designs.
3) Continued broadband strip below for those who don’t have broadband client–that hasn’t changed much.
4) AOL Dashboard replacing channel strip–Like the current AOL IM/Mail tool, this object can open and close, collapsing on command. What does it do? Weather, money, radio search and dictionary reference are the highlights.
5) Refreshing tabs and expanded views. Right now the Welcome Screen has little buttons you click to see new current features and news. This new design allows you to use a tab to refresh the view. Tabs suggested a focus on younger audience/premium content/key demographic groups. A tabbed series right down by the promos offers Music Sports Teen People (this is the teen channel now) Customize. Note that all these categories appeal to the 13-25 demographic, and that they are all key categories to offer upsells in the form of premium services. Further, the Customize tab suggests that AOL will be able to go beyond the current capability it has in 8.0 to offer users the chance to select one of 8 screens and allow users to switch some components in and out–adding some of the capabilities of My AOL and My Netscape to the main screen. (Yes, it’s like RSS in a way).
Finally, doesn’t the whole thing look a lot like Citysearch? Lots of commerce and transaction services, plus community?

[Boing Boing]

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24

Again and again this season I was simply amazed with the quality of the show. The season finale was unreal. I was totally on the edge of my seat throughout and found myself actually yelling out load with excitement as the events unfolded. whoa!

I wonder if there really will be a 3rd season… the bar is certainly set pretty high!

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So nice…

At the end of a truly hectic day at work I was greeted by an amazing piece of Spam. This is better than a previous note I received. Though not as wacky, it is certainly creative and even though clearly spam, worth re-publishing…

You Can Purchase 1 Acre of Land on the Moon $29.99. Stake Your Claim Now

Moon Land For Sale, unbelievable, but true.

The Perfect gift
Great Long-Term investment
You retain full mineral rights
A Great conversation piece

Stake your claim

In 2003, the Trailblazer, a TransOrbital mission to the Moon, will deposit the names of the property holders listed in the database, on the actual Lunar surface.

Each package contains the deed for one acre of land and it lists the actual location of the property by quadrant, latitude and longitude.

A lunar map accompanies this, marked with an X showing the location of the property.

1 Acre of Land on the Moon $29.99

http://www.lunarlandrush.com

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Print Center Repair

I am in desperate need of a permanent fix to my Print Center… I’ve tried the fix from Apple and I’ve tried Print Center Repair, the app, but I can only get things to stick for a day or two before my system forgets that I have printers set-up.

If I try to print without checking to see if the system is ready, whatever app I am in freezes up. When I fix things, I have to reboot, which is not exactly convenient for work.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this??? Please…

UPDATE – With the update of Print Center Repair today to 3.0, I think I have finally figured out what my issue is. I can fix the print center app, by starting the CUPS Daemon Process (cupsd). Not sure why this turns off and gets all out of wack, but I do know how to (now) fix this and keep my system running without having to restart!

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POPFile is back…

I guess I was moving too quickly earlier this week when I ruled POPFile out as a solution for Entourage Spam Filtering thinking that it could only support Subject modification and not extra headers… Seems in fact that it can do the X-Text-Classification: method which is great since my accuracy scoring with POPFile is excellent – 97+%. I have SpamSieve set to run in my rules right after POPFile searches for Spam which lets me catch any loose ends. All this stuff drops into my Spam folder for checking and deletion.

POPFile is a much stronger solution to SpamSieve though together they seem like a solid bullet-proof vest for spam.

Since POPFile requires a bit more technical oomph to get going, I thought it would be once again worth while to link to Michael Artz’ excellent instructions for installation on Mac OS X.

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A Simple Plan

The idea is a simple one: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner must pay a $1 maintanence fee. If the copyright owner pays the fee, then the copyright continues. If the owner fails to pay the fee, the work passes into the public domain. Based on historical precedent, we expect 98% of copyrighted works would pass into the public domain after just 50 years. They could keep Mickey for as long as Congress lets them. But we would get a public domain.

[Lessig]

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Krakow Responds…

Gary Krakow responds this week to the response he received to his pretty negative review of the iTunes Music Store from last week…

I’ve received thousands of e-mails in the past week on the subject of Apple’s new iTunes Music Store. Many wrote to say they couldn’t hear the sound quality differences I spoke about, others said I should have been more clear that the problems with compressed music go beyond Apple’s format. And, of course, there were the usual e-mails from people who think Bill Gates dictates every word I write. Below is a sampling of the more printable reader reaction, along with my responses.