8 Ways to Sunday

I checked my inbox this morning and was surprised to find several “this message was undeliverable” bounce messages with addresses of people I don’t know. I was even more alarmed when I discovered that the attached “original” message was a pornographic spam!

It turns out that someone is spoofing my domain in their spam messages, pretending to send them from nonsense addresses like “CMXLIZXRTUS@adammessinger.com” and “ylhnjhxvvehtf@adammessinger.com.” I never would’ve gotten the bounced-back error messages to those addresses if I didn’t have my mail server configured to send all unrouted mail to this domain to my real e-mail address.

If you’ve come here because you’re pissed that you’ve received spam from an address like the ones above, please believe me when I say that I did not send these messages. I’ll be talking to my sysadmin about how to prevent this in the future.

Anyone care to suggest a new name for “microcontent browsers”? Jason Kotke has pointed out that it’s “a bad name for a good idea” — the idea being software like RSS/Atom feed readers.

Marketing has always interested me, even though my conscience wouldn’t tolerate actually being in the business. “Thin browser” is too late-90s, and “smart browser” is too vague and calls to mind smart bombs. “Micro browser” doesn’t really explain what it is, and sounds like something for a PDA. “Meta browser” has some promise, given the level of abstraction and manipulability provided by the formats’ metadata; on the other hand, relatively few people in the mass culture know what “meta” means. Anyone else out there have any good ideas on this?

(citations: Kotke.org)

Or, “How to debate creationists without being boring.” (David Galbraith’s Weblog)

Apparently, I have a LiveJournal account and never knew it. Kind of odd that they’re providing syndicated information this way. Where’s the benefit in it for them? Doesn’t bother me I suppose, since they do state that the content is syndicated and provide a link back to the source (this blog). Wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m actually a LiveJournal user, after all.