Far too often people send emails to full lists of their friends and families. The problem with this is that eventually, someone with not so good intentions ends up with lists just full of email addresses that they use to start spamming.
I had one main email address that I never used for any accounts and only gave it to close friends and my parents and another address that I always used when setting up accounts. This main address went at least two or three years without ever getting spam while the other constantly received spam. This was until one day when an extended family member somehow got a hold of that email address and sent an email to other people in the family as well as that address with all the email addresses listed in the TO field. I don’t remember what it was but I think it was something that was shown to be false by Snopes. Anyway, within a week I started getting a lot of spam to that email, after having gone years without ever getting any.
My guess is that some of the people that got the email forwarded it on until it reached a mailing list that shows the email and all the addresses it had been sent to on a web page where a spammer grabbed all those addresses. Or, it could’ve been forwarded directly to a spammer’s address.
This could’ve been easily avoided had that extended family member put all the email addresses in a little known field call the BCC field. BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy and it essentially means that it sends the email to whomever you want but it doesn’t display the email addresses. That way anyone down the line cannot grab those addresses to spam them. Virtually every email program offers the BCC field but not all display it as an option by default. You often have to enable it from an option menu.
So while the BCC Solution may not bring a total end to spam, it can be helpful to keep your friends and family from be spammed because of a message you sent them. Use it whenever sending an email to a list of friends and/or family; they’ll appreciate it!
With the launch of Apple’s Safari browser for Windows (in Beta) yesterday, besides all the bug issues, Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror (a blog that I read often via RSS) has pointed out some issues with how Microsoft and Apple render fonts differently. Microsoft (via ClearType) renders fonts smooth but crisp. Apple renders fonts smooth but not so crisp. Some say it’s blurry, but within OSX, it seems to fit well.
Anyway, the reason why these two render the fonts the way they do has already been discussed to death so I won’t go into that. Ultimately though, it helped me to understand something about myself when it comes to Web Design that I always thought was kind of odd…
For some reason, I’ve always had an easier time doing graphic design on my Mac but writing code has always been easier on a PC. Even though Photoshop is almost exactly the same on Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s OSX operating systems, I’m more inspired and can knock out graphics quicker on the Mac. Even though Dreamweaver is pretty much the same on both, I can knock out code quicker on the PC. I’ve always suspected it was the way the fonts displayed on the different operating systems, but after reading up on why they two render fonts the way they do, now I’m certain that is definitely the reason.
Now that Macs can run Windows as well as OSX, I’m planning to go back to just using Macs, although my G4 won’t do it since it has to be an Intel-based Mac so I have to buy a new one. This is mostly because I’m just tired of having to reinstall Windows on my computers every couple of years and all the other problems I’ve had with Windows and PC hardware. I’ve never felt like I needed to reinstall OSX on my Macs ever and I’ve hardly had any hardware issues.
Anyway, does anyone know if Boot Camp or Parallels render screen fonts the Mac way when you’re running Windows or does it keep it the Windows way? I’m going to have to find that out before I go back to the Macs. I use Visual Studio 2005 these days but I guess if Boot Camp or Parallels render the fonts in Windows apps the Apple way, then I may have to rethink that plan.
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