Month: August 2003

Downloading the spam

Decided to download the spam from my mailserver on localhost to my mail client so I can clean the mail server up and also take a look at some of the spam. They are getting quite clever now in how they avoid spamfilters. One I saw the other day used the fact that invalid html tags are ignored. So the spam contained a line such as “get y<hello>our ne<world>ws her<test>e” which would get past a spam filter looking for the words “get your news here”.

Weird ping times.

Been having some weird problems with the wireless in the past couple of days – software says I have a good or excellent signal running at 11mb yet performance to web pages is abysmal yet the wired computer is fine so I know its not the ADSL connection. I pinged my two websites from the xp laptop this morning and got an average connection time of 103 and 92ms for helsby.net and absoblogginlutely.net
However when I pinged from the wired connection it was about 10ms greater than the wireless connection! Like I said in the topic – weird!

Outlook unable to view pictures in html emails

Had an interesting problem this morning when one particular email client was getting “blank” emails whenever he was sent an email in html format. However, on closer look pictures in the email were appearing for a fraction of a second and then disappearing again. Right clicking on the email and choosing view source showed the html source for the email. Saving this as a html file and opening it in internet explorer 6 (on the machine) showed a blank page. Looking at the same page in Firebird (which I had to download and run) showed the text and picture of the email. A quick look at the properties of Internet Explorer showed it was running without the servicepack1 to it. Updating it cured the problem – emails were now visible again. A very strange problem and one that had me stumped for a while. A search in google showed a few other people with the same problem but no solution – hopefully this post will help others in the future.

Custom 404 page edited.

Its taken me all weekend, but I have now edited my 404 page. I’m not that slow a coder – the time has included a very slow download and reinstallation of Foxserv after I broke my apache’s httpd.conf file when fiddling with it to get a custom 404 page on the laptop installation that I am testing with.
Now my 404 page does not send me a notification email if someone is using a hacking script to scan for formmail and ends up at my 404 page. Its been quite a good exercise in coding as I’ve used server variables to obtain the requested web page and the refererring page, Regular expressions to check that its not some variant of formmail and a couple of if statements to do the logic. This is the best way to learn php with a (small) project to do something useful on the website.