Posts by Phil Pemberton

Junk email volumes hit high

Just keeps getting worse...

Across three personal domains and my Gmail, I'm getting a spam rate of... wait for it... 99.894%. SpamAssassin means that I'm seeing about 3-4 spam messages per day, out of ~100/day that it catches, and a daily total of ~120-130 messages.

Ugh.

Most of the stuff that gets through SA seems to be image spam, and what's annoying is that it's all stuff that a bit of rudimentary image processing will pick up on and eliminate. Maybe that's what my final-year project needs to be -- an anti-image-spam add-on for Procmail.

DVLA issues double tax discs

The latest Government cockup?

Duplicate tax discs, eh?

Makes a difference from issuing licences that expire the day before they start, removing peoples' licence entitlements, and even issuing licences with "Untied Kingdom" printed on the front instead of "United Kingdom".

Not sure what the IT angle is (unless it's their response to being told their database is wrong -- "the computer is always right") but you've just got to love the DVLA.. Or loathe them, I always get those two mixed up. :-)

(Ref: Watchdog, BBC1, 27th April and 4th May 2009)