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SILICON SILIC CHIP www.siliconchip.com.au Publisher/Editor Nicholas Vinen Technical Editor John Clarke – B.E.(Elec.) Technical Staff Jim Rowe – B.A., B.Sc. Bao Smith – B.Sc. Tim Blythman – B.E., B.Sc. Advertising Enquiries (02) 9939 3295 adverts<at>siliconchip.com.au Regular Contributors Allan Linton-Smith Dave Thompson David Maddison – B.App.Sc. (Hons 1), PhD, Grad.Dip.Entr.Innov. Geoff Graham Associate Professor Graham Parslow Dr Hugo Holden – B.H.B, MB.ChB., FRANZCO Ian Batty – M.Ed. Phil Prosser – B.Sc., B.E.(Elec.) Cartoonist Louis Decrevel loueee.com Founding Editor (retired) Leo Simpson – B.Bus., FAICD Silicon Chip is published 12 times a year by Silicon Chip Publications Pty Ltd. ACN 626 922 870. ABN 20 880 526 923. All material is copyright ©. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written consent of the publisher. Subscription rates (Australia only) 6 issues (6 months): $65 12 issues (1 year): $120 24 issues (2 years): $230 Online subscription (Worldwide) 6 issues (6 months): $50 12 issues (1 year): $95 24 issues (2 years): $185 For overseas rates, see our website or email silicon<at>siliconchip.com.au Recommended & maximum price only. Editorial office: Unit 1 (up ramp), 234 Harbord Rd, Brookvale, NSW 2100. Postal address: PO Box 194, Matraville, NSW 2036. Phone: (02) 9939 3295. ISSN: 1030-2662 Printing and Distribution: Editorial Viewpoint Junk email is out of control We have multiple layers of junk email filtering, starting with an adaptive Bayesian filtering system, followed by hand-written rejection rules, then junk filtering on our email clients. Despite this, we still get hundreds of junk emails per day. Sometimes they come in every few seconds. If I removed all the filtering, it would be thousands per day. This can make it very hard to find legitimate emails among the deluge. It’s also hard to get any work done when we are constantly interrupted by notifications for new emails when most of them are a waste of our time. I just received another one while writing that last sentence. Ugh! It’s getting to the point where we might have to stop paying attention to incoming emails except for checking a few times per day. That way, we can more efficiently delete all the junk. Unfortunately, that will mean readers or customers who want to ask us questions or otherwise get support will have to wait longer. If you tried to contact us lately but didn’t get a reply, that might explain what happened to your email. In that case, please try again; hopefully, the second time will be the charm. There needs to be an internet-wide system for dealing with this type of junk (and scams too). Every email client should have a button to report a message as junk or a scam to a local authority. Once that authority gets more than a couple of reports for the same originating server/IP address, it should be automatically disconnected from the rest of the internet until it can be proven that it is no longer a source of these rubbish messages, eg, by fixing the misconfiguration or remove the virus that was allowing spammers/scammers to use it as a relay. As I wrote that last paragraph, I got another ten junk emails. This is a solvable problem, but a more comprehensive effort is needed to deal with it. We use SPF (sender policy framework) to prevent junk mail from claiming to come from us but that does little to stop us from receiving it unless everyone uses similar technology. One solution I have considered is to use a service like Google’s Gmail, which seems to be very good at dealing with junk mail, but I think it errs on the side of placing legitimate emails in the junk pile to do that, which is not ideal. I also don’t like the idea of having our email hosted by a foreign company, nor do I want to pay extra for a service we can otherwise provide ourselves. Email forwarding concerns While I’m on the topic of email, we sometimes have problems sending emails to readers when they have email forwarding set up improperly. If you forward from address a<at>x.com to address b<at>y.com by simply redirecting the whole email to the y.com server, it will be rejected. That’s because that server sees our from address as <at>siliconchip.com.au, but the originating server from its point of view (x.com) is not one of our mail servers. The solution is for the forwarder to re-write the ‘from address’ so that it is in its domain; in this case, x.com. That way, the receiving server will see that it matches the source and won’t reject it. If you forward your email to another address, please check that it does this correctly. Otherwise, any emails we (and others using SPF) send you will probably be rejected. Cover image: www.pexels.com/photo/white-outer-space-satellite-586056/ by Nicholas Vinen 24-26 Lilian Fowler Pl, Marrickville 2204 2 Silicon Chip Australia's electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au