Recently I was perplexed by the number of spam messages that were getting through my SpamAssassin setup. A coworker forwarded a couple obvious spams the other day and he was wondering too. So I decided to do a little digging. Out of a random sample of spam coming through when I checked, about 85% or more were using a particular tactic trying to bypass filters.

All of them had a faked received header at the “beginning” of the message’s path. The faked header matched up with the faked from address as well. Of course this was not a big shock. I’ve seen faked headers before, but not on this scale and so similar. An unusual number of them were pushing stocks instead of pills, too.

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A while back, as an exercise to help learn python, I wrote a script that removes temporary files in Windows (9x/me/2k/XP/etc) – It’s far from perfect, but it sure saves a lot of time compared to cleaning things out manually. If you’re feeling daring, give it a try: download tempcleaner. I’ll post the source once I get it cleaned up a little better, and put a blurb about it in the projects section.

I made a reference to it in the previous post I made about spyware removal.

So you’ve found yourself fighting a machine loaded to the gills with crap. Lucky you. Hopefully this helps make the job a little easier. I deal with spyware on pretty much a daily basis. I hate it. The only ones who like it are the ones making money off of it, and I don’t mean the poor techs stuck cleaning up the mess.

This article is geared more toward Windows XP/2k, though it can apply to earlier releases. Some of this may be useful to the home user, but it may be more helpful to those who have to work on many machines (for work, for family, for the neighborhood). I’m open to comments, I’d love it if someone would suggest better methods to accomplish any of the tasks I describe. I’d also appreciate hearing about other utilities that are used.

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I noticed in the logs that some people were getting 404′s or redirected to pages that weren’t right, due to the site layout change. I added some redirects that should take care of that problem. If you got to this page expecting to see something else, try browsing the page links at the right, and let me know what’s broken.

I fixed the lingering issues with IE, I hope. Note to self: IE does not like to overlap floating elements when you have, say, a table or hr with the width=100%. Oh, and using “position: relative” on the floating element helps keep it from getting chopped off.

Coming soon: more pictures, more posts.

This page looks really good in Firefox, and seems to have a few issues with IE. I’m still trying to sort out some CSS overlap/clear/etc issues. IE’s sucky CSS support is to blame I’m sure, so it’s just a matter of figuring out how to break the perfectly valid code to make it show up properly in IE.

In the meantime, if some options appear to be missing on the right, navigate to one of the other pages where it shows up just fine.

Or you could just download Firefox :).