Spam - not just a nuisance

I'm sure most of us are sick of all the spam we receive. Medications, viruses, university diplomas, sex, lotteries, unreadable email in Chinese or Russian - I'm sure you've seen it all. Myself I receive hundreds each day. What most of us do is to use some kind of spam filter. Well, this seems to work. Most of the garbage disappears. BUT sometimes these programs are a little too eager; they also remove email you wish to receive. Especially filters used by some Internet Service Providers gives you little control over what is deleted. We have over the last months experienced increasing problems reaching some of our customers because our emails get deleted. So the increasing amount of spam is not just a niusance, it can cause your own emails to not not reach the recipient, or the reply will not reach you. If you send somebody an email with a question, please also add his/her email address to your friends list if you're running a spam filter.

We have decided not to use automatic spam filtering or removal. We will not risk loosing any of the emails our customers send us. We have installed a program named MailWasherPro http://www.firetrust.com/firetrustpro.html). This will read the mail headings for the mail server and list all the mails. You can define filters and it even uses the SpamCop database to mark email from known spammers. So it will mark the emails as legitimate or probable spam, but it's up to you to make the final decision on what to delete. Since MailWasherPro don't download the whole email, it's no chance your computer will become infected by viruses in the emails. Takes a little more time than an automatic spam filter, but much less chance of loosing emails. It will learn what you consider to be spam and what you consider to be legitimate so it become more effective when you have used it for a while.

Exactly where did I take that picture?

I'm an eager Geocacher. Geocaching is a sport where the goal is to find some "treasures" that are hidden all over the world. See geocaching.com for more information. To find them, you need a GPS (Global Positioning System Receiver). On these trips, I always bring my digital camera and usually takes lots of phots. Some time ago I got an idea; The GPS stores your position every 10th second, the digital camera stores the exact time the photo was taken. Why not write a program that matches the time in the GPS file and in the picture files to find the exact coordinates for where the photo was taken? So I sat down programming. Today, I was for the first time able to calculate the position for a series of photos. The coordinates will be stored inside the EXIF meta data of the image file so the information stays with the file. A beta version of this program will be available shortly on the web pages of BR Software.