More non-spam

 Technology  5 Responses »
Sep 292008
 

The false pos­it­ive prob­lem with Gmail con­tin­ues, in the last few days the fol­low­ing have wrongly gone into the spam bucket

  • noti­fic­a­tion of my bank state­ment (nev­er used to go into spam, so this is a new problem)
  • noti­fic­a­tions about my tod­dler­’s music class
  • my son’s class list
  • Bob Park’s “What’s New” newsletter
  • a reply to email to the pub­lic W3C DOM mail­ing list (the ori­gin­al email made it through ok)
  • a request from someone to use one of my photos

Few of them match the prob­lems to which Gmail prof­fers solu­tions. I’m going to have to rethink what I do for travel and week­ends and stop using Gmail as a pass-through spam filter.

Gmail and Spam

 Technology  No Responses »
Sep 232008
 

When I’m trav­el­ling I run my per­son­al email through my Gmail account, so I have a bet­ter web browser inter­face than the one my ISP provides. Lots of people told me about how good the spam fil­ter is; I tend to find too many false pos­it­ives (admit­tedly, most from mail­ing list sub­scrip­tions) so I check my spam folder reg­u­larly. I was puzzled as to why many of Tim’s emails to me ended up in spam , and in par­tic­u­lar those to the soc­cer team our son is on. If you’re send­ing email to a num­ber of people, some of whom may use Gmail (even if their email address isn’t Gmail, they still might use it as I do, or their com­pany may use Gmail for mail), or if you use Gmail your­self, you need to be aware of this problem. 

Google has a help page on the top­ic and it turns out there are two solu­tions. If you’re on the receiv­ing end, you can set up a fil­ter to whitel­ist a par­tic­u­lar email address. If you’re send­ing the emails, make sure the To: head­er does­n’t match the From: head­er. This can cause a prob­lem with some dis­tri­bu­tion list sys­tems where you put your own email address in the To: head­er to obscure the email addresses you’re send­ing the mes­sage to; if you need to do this it’s prob­ably a good idea to get a Gmail account if you don’t already have one and try things out.

Mountain Photos

 Travel  3 Responses »
Sep 082008
 

On the way to Bal­is­age in Mon­tréal, the plane flew very low for the first part of the trip, about 19 000 feet (about 5800 m), to escape the smoke from fires in the Okanagan. Unusu­ally for me, I was in the win­dow seat and decided to take some pho­tos of Mount Baker and the oth­er moun­tains as we flew by. Mount Baker is famil­i­ar to every­one in Van­couver who can see far enough south; when we lived in an apart­ment in Yaletown we could judge the weath­er and the air pol­lu­tion by how clear Mount Baker looked. Fly­ing by with such a good view gave me a good chance to see what it looks like from the oth­er side.

Mt Baker

The rest of the pho­tos from the set are up on Flickr, tagged with “moun­tains”, should you be interested.

WordPress and Atom

 WordPress  2 Responses »
Sep 052008
 

On my craft­ing blog I use the Tarski theme, and that used to give you the choice between Atom and RSS for the feeds. Then they took it out, say­ing that Word­Press itself gives you the choice. Well, maybe it does (or maybe it did), but nowhere in the options for 2.6.1 that I could find (maybe you need a plu­gin to do it?). Then I dis­covered that this blo­g’s default feed had been changed to RSS2 some time when I was­n’t look­ing, which also was­n’t what I wanted. 

To jog my memory next time I upgrade Word­Press and want to use Atom by default, here’s where to change the set­ting. For­tu­nately PHP code is easy to search through! The file is feed.php in the wp-includes dir­ect­ory. Change the second para­met­er in the get_default_feed func­tion to atom. With­in any luck this meth­od will even con­tin­ue to work in the next ver­sion. I’ll cer­tainly know to check what the default feed format is in the future.

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