FIRST SPAM

I don't get all that much email spam compared to reports from
others. Some stems from a known data leak from a major company, but
that seems to have mostly died off. Most is to my main
business-related email address, where I'm too polite to make the
address un-copy-pste-able, and that's also predictable enough that
bots appear to simply guess it too (looking at all the other names
in the logs from when their guesses fail). Also things related to
my purchasing products from Chinese sellers, who obviously sell off
the email addressess that their customers use.

This of course is all the wonderful world of the modern internet,
and should be no surprise to anyone who lives there. But the
interesting question was: is Gopher part of this world?

Well until now the un-obscured email addresses I show on my 'home'
Gophermap here have faced a rewarding silence from the web's feared
automated respondents. Today though, no longer. This morning I
found addressed to my back-up [email protected]
address the first email it's had in quite a long time, a proposal
for a business opportunity helping some rich Ukranian. A rather
dodgy prospect, even if it wasn't unsolicited and sent from a mail
server with a domain name registered in Nigeria. Yandex had
identified it as Spam ("oborona" in Russian, it seems), so I could
have filtered it out if I wanted to, except I wouldn't because
I've had so much pain from Gmail filtering my own legitimate emails
out of other people's inboxes in the past so I wouldn't want to do
that to someone else (I wouldn't be surprised if Google are worse
than Yandex at spam false-positives though).

But that indeed is the issue, it proves that, as likely as it
always was, Gopher is still connected to the nasty parts of the
modern internet. The internet where people get Gmail accounts just
so that they can reliably talk to other people with Gmail accounts,
who would otherwise ignore them as auto-filtered spam.

I didn't get any spam to the main [email protected] address yet.
Mind you neither have I heard any response from Fosslinux about the
server uploads failing. I guess I'd better send myself a test
message to make sure the Aussies.space email server isn't faulty
too... [worked]

On the up side, my knee seems to be almost recovered. It didn't
bite me once in my sleep last night and I drove the ute into town
yesterday without any gear-change agony. Still definately not up to
walking far yet, but good enough to get back to work on the
under-side  of the car. Except that rain suddenly returned yesterday
and my service bay is flooded again, ho hum.

- The Free Thinker