For some inexplicable reason, some guy who identifies himself as Mamadou Diallo, a.k.a. Bouba Diallo, has been creating accounts all over the internet using my email address for over two years now. I’ve written about this several times before. It’s still going on… I just got email indicating that he created a Yahoo! account (“m.diallo76”)… Read More »
The privacy of our email is protected by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in 1986, which requires law-enforcement officials to obtain a warrant to intercept and read private email. However, the law has a critical flaw: it does not require a warrant for emails “left on servers” for more than 180 days. This made… Read More »
UPDATE [2013-02-13]: According to this article on Craigslist, as of February 10, 2013, they have implemented and are testing the idea I described below for fixing the problem described in this posting. I recently placed a for-sale ad on Craigslist. I anonymized my email address in the ad, which means that the published email address… Read More »
Somebody seems to be using my email address in a weird, ongoing way that doesn’t seem to be benefiting them in any way. The fact that I can’t figure out why they’re doing it concerns me, because I have to suspect that there is some benefit to them, which I just haven’t been able to… Read More »
I try to make a habit of giving out “tagged” email addresses to web sites when I sign up for accounts / mailing lists / whatever. For example, when creating an account at widgets.com, instead of just signing up as “jik@kamens.us”, I might sign up as “jik+widgets@kamens.us”. It ends up in the same mailbox regardless,… Read More »
I recently encountered a bizarre problem with Mail.app, the email client included in Mac OS X, that took me quite a while to solve (with no help from AppleCare; more on that in a separate blog posting). I’m posting about the problem and its solution here so that, with any luck, the next person who… Read More »
You’ve probably heard by now (the party line from Gawker, an a much more comprehensive analysis from Forbes) that a huge database of Gawker Media usernames and (poorly) encrypted passwords was recently stolen, and that the thieves published the stolen data for anyone in the world to download, and that the thieves managed to crack… Read More »
Yesterday, my wife forwarded to me an email message she had received from our children’s school to ask me a question about it. I should have received the same message, but I hadn’t. A little research in the mail server logs revealed that she has received seven messages from the school in the past three… Read More »