I'm actually going to add
admin@caudata.org and
info@caudata.org to the spam filter blacklist as soon as I finish typing this. Someone is spoofing these addresses, also
webmaster@caudata.org, and even once that I recall,
john@caudata.org. Apart from
john@caudata.org, none of the aforementioned addresses actually exist - they are forwarders to my own email account - no one can actually send real emails as those accounts. I once had several emails, and 2 or 3 phone calls, from a curator at the Smithsonian institute in the US who was accusing me of trying to give his computers a virus, when it was someone spoofing my email. While trying to get over how bizarre this was at the time (someone like that calling me on the phone half way across the world), I explained to him that it was not really us and that I can't prevent others from impersonating us.
I will only ever email you from
john@caudata.org, and if I do so, it'll be a logical message. Anything else is spam, a virus, or someone messing around. I will _never_ send you an attachment that you don't know about. I only ever use a plain-text email composition program so you'll never see html/pictures/designs in my messages either.
I'm also making a change to the way our Spam detection works. Up until now, a lot of spam has been automatically deleted. Each email is given a "likely to be spam" rating as it arrives on the server. At the moment those that exceed a set threshhold rating are auto-deleted and you never see them. There was a time in the past when I had set this tolerance rating too low, so some emails were being automatically deleted in error. I'm going to try an experiment for a few days. I'm going to lower the tolerance again, but to avoid the odd real email being deleted, I'm going to let these "tagged" emails come through to your inboxes. The subject line will have "SPAM" in it, along with the spam rating versus the spam threshold. For example, if the threshold is 10, and an email gets a raiding of 11, it will arrive in your inbox with a subject prefixed with something like: SPAM 11/10.
Most email clients have a filter system where you can use the word SPAM to put the emails in a different box/folder (i.e. use a "filter"), for checking later, or mass deletion.
Let me know how this goes.
