h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

And what's more, Spamarama happens two weeks from today http://www.spamarama.com

Doesn't Gmail block images in e-mails because it's possible that a link to a different image was included in each e-mail sent, and so the senders know which e-mails were opened by which images were referenced? But since Gmail blocks the things, they don't. I thought that was the idea, anyway.

I get very little spam, really -- nothing compared to some of ye. But I do get the LabTalk newsletter, which also sends out an All-Advertising Suppliment, which I don't want to read. I tried reporting it as spam, but then the real newsletter went to the spam folder too. So now I have a filter set up to delete it.

Shows that the Gmail spam filter is fairly trainable, but not as trainable as I'd like.

TRiG.

I'm having a very unusual problem with Gmail today. In the middle of signing in to one of my accounts (having already looked at three or four others) I got the " We're sorry, but Gmail is temporarily unavailable. We're currently working to fix the problem -- please try logging in to your account in a few minutes." error message.

Okay, I though, I'll try again in a few minutes... which I did, and again five minutes after that, and again some time later, all to no avail. In fact a few *hours* later I'm still getting the message each time I reload the page or open a new tab and try from my bookmarks - I can't get at the Gmail sign in page.

In Mozilla.

I can get at it perfectly well in Opera and sign in to any of my accounts.

There you go. I've been telling you for years that Opera is a superior browser

Yes... yes you have

The Gmail spam filter has been letting several spams through to my inbox just lately, and on more than one of my Gmail accounts.

The spammed one of mine is now down to 1,600 per month from a high of 2,500 or so. Maybe they're getting bored of me!

The others do let in one or two, but only the one or two, and they are easily dealt with.

Starting yesterday, I've been finding several spam messages in the inbox of just one of my accounts - the one with my own name . Either the subject or the first few lines of the mail mention Harley-Davidson. It's almost unheard for more than one or two spams a month to get through gmail's filter.

Oddly enough, a few weeks ago I couldn't get into Gmail at all with Opera, it just returned me to the sign-in page. IE and Firefox worked fine.

And then it started working again in Opera. I don't know what changed anywhere.

But with Opera I never could sign into Blogger; nor could I sign into YouTube with my Google account, though I could sign in with the attached YouTube account.

I'm running on very low disk space at the moment, and am uninstalling everything, so Opera's gone for the moment. I'll get it back shortly.

Back to the subject of spam: yesterday I found an "e-mail not delivered" message in my inbox, for an e-mail I'd never sent to an address and domain I'd never heard of. I don't use a mail client, so it can't be a virus sending out messages from my account, can it? So is someone else sending spam in my name? Or what?

TRiG.

Yes, people send spam in other people's names, by faking a reply-to field and relying on the recipient being too stupid to trace the real origin (as of course an autobounce program typically will be!). Some people even sign up to organisations using the wrong email address (hard to tell if that one is deliberate misbehaviour or simple stupidity of people who mistyped what they thought their address was).

Now that gmail is offering imap access is anybody using it?
(I've just set up Alpine to access gmail via imap - it all appears to be working so far )

What are the advantages?

Advantage of a local client over web-mail is that generally local clients are a lot more sophisticated at mail handling, e.g. I use Alpine (Pine) because it is particularly good at dealing with large volume mailing lists of which I'm subscribed to a few.

Advantage of imap over pop is that everything is kept in sync with your mail server - so if I delete a message using Alpine and then check my Gmail account using the web interface it will have been deleted, similarly if I read a new message using the web interface and then later check my mail using Alpine that message would show up as read and so on.

I see.

Incidentally, I think I've somehow been signed up for an MSN group http://www.google.com/search?q=todd%27s+harley+pix

If that's the case I'm wondering if I should go in there and unsubscribe, or is this some kind of 'If you click on it you'll be flagged' kind of thing, like opening a spam mail. If I just keep moving them to the spam folder, will gmail eventually get the idea and just put them all in there? There were 13 when I got home about an hour ago, and three more since banishing those.

Looks like a fan site rather than spam and none of the first 30 google hits were about spam complaints so I'd be tempted to try and unsubscribe however if you are at all dubious about unsubscribing instead of keep hitting the spam button why don't you just create a filter for the address it is from sending all mail from that address straight to your deleted-items folder skipping your inbox.