It is to weep...
Friday, August 8th, 2003 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caddymanSometimes you have a conversation that makes you wonder if you might have stepped off the planet without noticing.
To explain:
Here in the office, we have a very efficient firewall and email filtering system which keeps unwanted crap at bay very well indeed. In the seven or so years this department has been fully on-line, I have never received so much as a single spam at my office address. Until three weeks ago.
At the time, I merely noted that it had arrived and deleted it. Today I received another. Now two spams in seven years is nothing - I can beat that flat on my home PC after 10 minutes on-line any time of day, any day of the week. Nonetheless, it seems clear that someone out there has got a hold of an (admittedly obsolete) official email address of mine, probably picked up by a spider or some such flitting through old web pages or consultation papers.
So this suggests to me that I have further spamming joy lined up for me at work, and the nature of these things being as it is, the growth will be exponential.
So, thinks I, let's have a chat with the IT Help desk and see if there's something that can be done to nip the problem before it's even in the bud.
So I did. I outlined the situation pretty much as I have just done here, pointing out that it is not yet a problem, but may well become so.
Imagine, therefore, my surprise and bafflement, when the chap on the other end of the phone said, "...can I stop you there? I don't quite understand. What precisely is 'spam'?
To explain:
Here in the office, we have a very efficient firewall and email filtering system which keeps unwanted crap at bay very well indeed. In the seven or so years this department has been fully on-line, I have never received so much as a single spam at my office address. Until three weeks ago.
At the time, I merely noted that it had arrived and deleted it. Today I received another. Now two spams in seven years is nothing - I can beat that flat on my home PC after 10 minutes on-line any time of day, any day of the week. Nonetheless, it seems clear that someone out there has got a hold of an (admittedly obsolete) official email address of mine, probably picked up by a spider or some such flitting through old web pages or consultation papers.
So this suggests to me that I have further spamming joy lined up for me at work, and the nature of these things being as it is, the growth will be exponential.
So, thinks I, let's have a chat with the IT Help desk and see if there's something that can be done to nip the problem before it's even in the bud.
So I did. I outlined the situation pretty much as I have just done here, pointing out that it is not yet a problem, but may well become so.
Imagine, therefore, my surprise and bafflement, when the chap on the other end of the phone said, "...can I stop you there? I don't quite understand. What precisely is 'spam'?