Iâve used Eudora for around 25 years as my email client and in the early days, when the inbox got too big, I had it crash every now and then, necessitating the program to rebuild the table of contents. From memory Iâve lost some emails back then, too, and had to ask friends to re-send. But, by and large, itâs been largely stable, and since Windows 7 I donât recall it crashing so badly that I would be up shit creek. Till last night.
Normally, Eudora has back-ups for its in- and outboxes (which it renames with 001 and 002 suffixes) so in the case of a lost âbox, you can rename the old ones and hopefully not lose too much. But what if a crash was so severe it would take out not only the in- and outboxes, but also the content of the back-ups, as well as your third-quarter email folder? Thatâs exactly what happened.
I havenât gone back into Windows to find out what caused the series of crashes but it seems to have begun with RuntimeBroker.exe and ntdll.dll. Iâm not even going to pretend I know what all this means:
So what do you do when youâre up shit creek and renaming mailboxes (which Iâve had to do when we had a fuse blow) doesnât work?
The most recent back-up I had was from September 5, and a lot happens in email-land for me over the course of six days. But it was the most recent, and it had to be the starting-point. So, first up, I retrieved them from Windows Backup and put them into a temporary folder (you canât put them into the original folder).
The third-quarter âboxâs contents were still there, but the table of contents had been corrupted, but it had six daysâ worth of changes to it. I renamed this to Q3 In (2), closed Eudora, and placed the backed-up third-quarter mailbox and table into the Eudora folder.
Then itâs the laborious process of seeing how they differ. The best thing to doâand why Eudora remains superior to so many later programsâis to line up the mailbox windows side by side, size them the same, sort them both by date, and begin going through screen by screen. If the first email and the last email are identical, chances are the ones in the middle are identical, so youâre only looking for the emails in the corrupted table that are newer. You then have to shift them one by one into the backed up one. I deleted the identical ones from the corrupted mailbox and by the end of the exercise I had over 4,200 emails in the trash.
The status (read, replied) is gone after the transfers but itâs a tiny price to pay for completeness.
Above: The remnants of the exercise, after discarding trash and duplicate emails from the corrupted third-quarter mailbox.
Then the inbox. Same story: there was a 001 âbox that had survived the crash but none of the tables of contents were usable.
In this case, itâs fortunate we use Zoho as our email service. I went into the trash folder, where all checked emails wind up after POP3 access, and transferred everything from the 5th to the present day into the inbox. Fortunately, from there itâs not difficult to do a fresh POP3 access. Again, I closed Eudora, put the backed-up inbox into the main Eudora folder, and simply checked my emails. You do lose once more the status of the emailsâyou wonât know if youâve replied to themâbut at least you have an inbound record.
The outbox was a very sad case, and unfortunately the news is not good. Here, the table of contents was complete but the mailboxes (all of them) were blank. Therefore, clicking on the table of contentsâ entries actually deleted them because the mailbox was corrupted. Strangely, all showed the correct sizes.
Thereâs no easy way here. You canât take sent emails from Zoho and put them into your inbox expecting Eudora to be able to download them. The only solution I found was to forward each one, one by one, to myself from within Zoho. Then I placed them into either my third-quarter outbox or the active outbox. My own name appears in the recipient column, and the dates are wrong, but, again, if completeness is the aim, then itâs a small price to pay. Sadly, of the three recovered âboxes and tables of contents, itâs the least elegant.
I imagine I could edit each email as a text file within the outbox and allow the table of contents to generate new entries, then recompile them into a new table, but after youâve spent hours doing the first two âboxes, youâre not keen on such a technical solution after 3 a.m. And there’s also no guarantee that the table would generate properly anyway.
Windows was the culprit here, as Eudora has always been very stable, and crashes like this are exceedingly rare, if you keep your in- and outboxes to reasonable sizes. Iâve never seen the back-ups get wiped out as well. A good case study in favour of regular back-ups, and maybe I might need even more frequent ones.
I said it a long time ago: that the Carlos Ghosn arrest was part of a boardroom coup, and that the media were used by Hiroto Saikawa and co. (which I said on Twitter at the time). It was pretty evident to me given how quickly the press conferences were set up, how rapidly there was âevidenceâ of wrongdoing, and, most of all, the body language and demeanour of Mr Saikawa.
Last week emerged evidence that would give meâand, more importantly, Carlos Ghosn, who has since had the freedom to make the same allegation that he was set upâcause to utter âI told you so.â I read about it in The National, but I believe Bloomberg was the source. The headline is accurate: âNissan emails reveal plot to dethrone Carlos Ghosnâ; summed up by âThe plan to take down the former chairman stemmed from opposition to deeper ties between the Japanese company and France’s Renaultâ.
One highlight:
the documents and recollections of people familiar with what transpired show that a powerful group of insiders viewed his detention and prosecution as an opportunity to revamp the global automakerâs relationship with top shareholder Renault on terms more favourable to Nissan.
A chain of email correspondence dating back to February 2018, corroborated by people who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive information, paints a picture of a methodical campaign to remove a powerful executive.
Another:
Days before Mr Ghosnâs arrest, Mr Nada sought to broaden the allegations against Mr Ghosn, telling Mr Saikawa that Nissan should push for more serious breach-of-trust charges, according to correspondence at the time and people familiar with the discussions. There was concern that the initial allegations of underreporting compensation would be harder to explain to the public, the people said.
The effort should be âsupported by media campaign for insurance of destroying CG reputation hard enough,â Mr Nada wrote, using Mr Ghosnâs initials, as he had done several times in internal communications stretching back years.
Finally:
The correspondence also for the first time gives more detail into how Nissan may have orchestrated [board member] Mr Kellyâs arrest by bringing him to Japan from the US for a board meeting.
Nissanâs continuing official position, that Ghosn and Kelly are guilty until proved innocent, has never rang correctly. Unless youâre backed by plenty of people, that isnât the typical statement you should be making, especially if itâs about your own alleged dirty laundry. You talk instead about cooperating with authorities. In this atmosphere, with Nissan, the Japanese media duped into reporting it based on powerful Nissan executives, and the hostage justice system doing its regular thing, Ghosn probably had every right to believe he would not get a fair trial. If only one of those things were in play, and not all three, he might not have reached the same conclusion.
In the early days, banner advertising was pretty simple. By the turn of the century, we dealt with a couple of firms, Burst Media and Gorilla Nation, and we had a few buy direct. Money was good.
This is the pattern today if we choose to say yes to anyone representing an ad network.
I get an email, with, âHey, weâve got some great fill rates and CPMs!â
I quiz them, tell them that in the past weâve been disappointed. Basically, because each ad network has a payment threshold (and in Burstâs case they deduct money as a fee for paying you money), the more ad networks we serve in each ad spotâs rotation, the longer it takes to reach each networkâs threshold. And some networks donât even serve ads that we can see.
They say that that wonât happen, so I do the paperwork and we put the codes in.
Invariably we either see crap ads (gambling and click-bait, or worse: pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials and entire page takeovers for either) or we see no ads, at least none thatâll pay.
Because we give people a chance we leave the codes there for a while, and that delays the payment thresholds just as predicted.
At the end of the day, itâs âThanks, but no thanks,â because no one really seems to honour their commitments when it comes to online advertising. With certain companies having monopoly or duopoly powers in this market, itâs led to depressed prices and a very high threshold for any new playersâand thatâs a bad thing for publishers. What a pity their home country lacks the bollocks to do something about it.
Every now and then they will feed through an advertisement from Google because of a contractual arrangement they have, and the ad isn’t clickableâbecause I guess no one at Google has figured out that that’s important. (Remember, this is the same company that didn’t know what significant American building is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC on Google Earth, and the way to deal with whistleblowers is allegedly to call the cops on them.)
We deal with one Scots firm and one Israeli firm these days, in the hope that not having American ad networks so dependent on, or affected by, a company with questionable ethics might help things just a little.
It pays to have some ground rules when dealing with the internet. A very big one that Iâm sure that you all observe is: donât do business with spammers. If a Nigerian prince tells you he has $5 million for you, ignore him.
There are tainted email lists that have been going around for years. I used to have filters for all sorts of permutations of my real address, back in the days when we had a âcatch-allâ email. My address definitely wound up on a South African spammersâ list in the late 1990s or early 2000s, and to this day I get South African spam from some respectable looking companies that took an unethical shortcut in compiling their targets. Thereâs a third where the spammer has confused the âcompanyâ and âfirst nameâ fields that began doing the rounds during the 2010s. All so easy to spot. If they claimed I signed up to their list, and don’t know my first and last names, then there’s a massive clue right there.
This all begs the question of why a company with the size and reputation of Netflix feels the need to resort to such lists. Here’s the fourth one this Gregorian calendar year as they up their frequency of spam:
Netflix spam, shown actual size.
Thereâs a thread online where one netizen was told by Netflix that someone else had signed them up, which is incredibly unlikely, and more likely an excuse to cover oneâs dodgy behaviour.
These began in November 2019 for me. The ‘This message was mailed to [âŠ] by Netflix because you created a Netflix account’ is untrue, and if it were true, how come there is no email confirmation of this account creation in any of my emails from 2019? Surely if you created one, Netflix would confirm your address at the very least? And if they don’t, then that’s pretty poor business practice.
This isnât a phishing attempt, as the links all go to Netflix and itâs come from Netflixâs account with Amazon, who doesnât seem to do much about it. If youâd like to see a similar one, someone has posted it online at samplespam.com/messages/2019-07-20/V801I2196eM554074 but where they have a header line with â00948.EMAIL.REMARKETING_GLOBAL_SERIES_CORE_2_DAY_4.-0005.-5.en.UAâ, mine has â00948.EMAIL.REMARKETING_GLOBAL_SERIES_CORE_2_DAY_4.-0005.-5.en.USâ. (Netflix thinks I live in the US.)
Thereâs no reply on Twitter. Nor was there any reply from this email that I sent to privacy@netflix.com last November:
The people they claim are in charge of privacy don’t care about privacy.
I shanât subscribe to Netflix any time soon because of Internet 101. If they don’t care about your privacy now, they’re probably not going to care about it after you’re a customer. In the 2020s, with people more sensitive about it, it’s foolhardy for Netflix to go against the trend. Right now, their email marketing has all the subtlety of a cheap scammerâsâjust with nicer presentation.
Some of you will have noticed that Po.st went out of business, so all the Po.st sharing links disappeared from our websites.
The replacement: addtoany.com offers a similar service without the hassle of header codes. Just customize at their website, grab the code, and insert it where you want it. Itâs now on the main Lucire website, Autocade (at least on the desktop version), and this blog (desktop as well). Strangely, the plug-in for Wordpress didn’t work for us, and the HTML code with Javascript is far more practical.
There are fewer customization options but itâs a remarkably quick and handy way to replace the old code.
Despite providing a sharing gadget, I wonder how much Iâll use one. Itâs been seven days since I last Instagrammed and I donât miss it. Granted, something major happened in my life but organic sharing had been dwindling through 2019, and if their algorithms arenât providing you with the dopamine hit that you seek, and youâre unlikely to pay for it like a junkie (which is what Facebook wants you to do), then you have to wonder what the point is. It might, like Facebook, just become one of those things one uses for workâand thatâs not something I could have predicted even a year ago.
I see Twitter is introducing features where responses can be limited by the user. The logical outcome of this is Tweets that are directed at limited audience members only, maybe even one-to-one. That looks remarkably like email. And these days I seem to be more productive there than I am on any social network.
Yesterday, I received an email purporting to be from Facebook, with the body reading:
Hi,
We are obliged to inform you that your page has been flagged because of unusual and illegal activity, therefore your page might be permanently deleted.
In order to avoid such actions from our side, you need to fill the forms following the link below.
If you decide not to act accordingly, we will immediately delete your page.
Yours,
Facebook Security Team
The âfromâ address is secure@facebook.com01259.com, which should already scream âFake!â but my eyes werenât drawn to that. Nor was it drawn to the fact the email came from AWS, not Facebook. I clicked on the link, because it was hosted at Facebook.
I arrived at this page:
Yes, itâs on Facebook, but itâs actually a Facebook page, which anyone can set up. This is the âaboutâ section from that page. If you click on their link, thatâs when you get suckered in, as you have to fill out information about your own page. Beyond this, you have to log in again, and thatâs when their fun starts.
After I learned of the scam, I sent out warnings on Twitter and on my public page at Facebook. I then reported the page to Facebook (itâs still there, as it has been since September). Thereâs also a second one along the same lines, also from September.
Hereâs the real kicker: my Facebook post has actually disappeared. Facebook has deleted a warning to other Facebook users about parties using their platform illegally for phishing and identity theft. Iâd call this an implicit endorsement of criminal activity.
Itâs not unlike Google Plus, which used to delete my posts critical of Google itselfâeven though these are real warnings.
Please do not be taken in by this identity theft scamâand Iâm very surprised that Facebook would actually allow it to happen.
Then again, remember Facebook used to force “malware scanner” downloads on us, so it seems to adopt the same tactics dodgy hackers do.
An email sent by me on March 27 to the head office of Lumino (the dentists). Link added for readers’ reference. I’ll let you make up your own minds.
Hi Josephine:
How are you?
I hate to bother you once more, as you had done everything you could to resolve the privacy issues I had with Goody’s subcontractor, Global Payments, last year. I was very happy with your professionalism and your actions. I am pleased to see Lumino has since gone with another provider for its loyalty programme.
I regret having to lean on you again.
As you know, I found it very uneasy that I allowed Lumino to have my private cellphone number and last year I made repeated requests to the Terrace branch to not contact me through it any more. I was given assurances that it would not happen again.
I had a hygienist appointment on November 16, which I cancelled via email due to the ‘flu. I was advised that there would be an opening in March 2019, but by this point I already had in mind I would switch dentists, as each Lumino dentist I was assigned to wound up leaving the practice. Therefore, I never replied.
On November 29, I was sent a reminder that I could book in if I clicked a link in the email. I never did.
Imagine my surprise when this week I received an SMS from Lumino accusing me of missing an appointment (that I had never made) and that there I could be charged for it.
This was the first I had ever heard of a March appointment. Back in November, Lumino would send email reminders (for the real appointments) so I really doubt there was anything booked.
It was rudely worded, in my opinion, presuming the customer to be wrong.
Call me intolerant, overly sensitive, or out of touch with modern communication techniques, but it seems the Terrace branch is incapable of following a basic request and now, it has concocted a missed appointment out of thin air.
Besides, I was not even in Wellington on the date concerned, so there was no way I would have made an appointment for it.
After hours spent on the 2018 privacy breach, fielding those scam calls that came [redacted as it’s something I believe to be true but cannot fully back it up without a few affidavits], receiving cellphone calls from Lumino waking me after four hours’ sleep, and getting tired of making the same request at branch level, I have to draw my relationship with Lumino to a close.
Going to the dentist or the hygienist shouldn’t be this hard, but with Lumino on the Terrace, it’s continually stressful.
I wonder if you could arrange to have my records transferred to Real Dentistry, 62 Rongotai Road, Kilbirnie, Wellington, then delete my details from your database. I have asked Real Dentistry to request my records from Lumino on the Terrace.
Thank you,
Yours truly,
Jack
I never got a reply this time, but I think we know what Lumino thinks of all of this as of today. Note: I contacted Josephine from a different email address, so they do have that to counter me with. Still, I thought I was pretty clear above.
I’ve also not received a reply from Heineken. Might have to get the Privacy Commissioner involved in this one, too.
I know most of you won’t care, since people haven’t abandoned Facebook en masse, and Google remains the most frequented site on the web. But I honestly thought New Zealand firms were better than this.
I’m not saying I can’t be connedâbecause by my own admission, I have beenâbut sometimes when you’re very sure of your position, scammers’ lies don’t work.
Here’s a fascinating one that came in today, a lot more aggressive than the usual request for helping someone move millions of dollars of bullion out of the country. I can imagine people getting sucked in to this, because I have a friend who really was filmed without his knowledge and then (unsuccessfully) blackmailed. I’m posting it in case others have received something similar.
I am well aware [redacted] one of your passphrase. Lets get straight to the purpose. You may not know me and you’re probably thinking why you are getting this e mail? No one has paid me to investigate you. In fact, I setup a software on the X videos (pornography) website and guess what, you visited this website to have fun (you know what I mean). When you were watching video clips, your web browser initiated functioning as a Remote Desktop having a keylogger which gave me access to your display screen and also web camera. after that, my software program gathered every one of your contacts from your Messenger, FB, and email . And then I created a double-screen video. 1st part displays the video you were viewing (you’ve got a good taste haha . . .), and second part displays the view of your webcam, and its u. You have got a pair of choices. Lets analyze these solutions in details: Very first choice is to dismiss this e-mail. In such a case, I will send out your actual video to all of your contacts and visualize regarding the awkwardness that you receive. Keep in mind if you are in an affair, exactly how it will affect? Other alternative will be to pay me $7000. Let us describe it as a donation. In such a case, I most certainly will right away remove your video. You will keep daily life like this never happened and you will not hear back again from me. You’ll make the payment by Bitcoin (if you don’t know this, search for “how to buy bitcoin” in Google search engine). BTC Address to send to: 1AarwsrgvhQ5CNuhWGMjmv34yPQTXWEaxh [case SENSITIVE, copy and paste it] Should you are wondering about going to the cop, surely, this message cannot be traced back to me. I have covered my moves. I am not trying to ask you for a huge amount, I would like to be paid for. I have a unique pixel within this e-mail, and at this moment I know that you have read this email message. You have one day in order to make the payment. If I don’t get the BitCoins, I will certainly send your video recording to all of your contacts including close relatives, coworkers, etc. Nonetheless, if I receive the payment, I will erase the video immediately. If you want proof, reply with Yea and I will send out your video to your 13 contacts. It is a non-negotiable offer, that being said please don’t waste my personal time & yours by replying to this message.
There’s plenty of evidence this is automated.
Think carefully: if he knows this much about you, then why isn’t he addressing you by name?
And I haven’t used that particular password for nearly 20 years, so there’s a chance he came across this through the hacking of a defunct website. I also seldom use the same password for different websites (there are a handful of exceptions).
It’s also helpful that I haven’t ever committed a sex act in front of my computer, but I have a feeling that others might think this was a real threat given how many people visit porn sites daily.
If this was genuine, as it was for a friend of mine, it would come with a screen shot of the video that he claims to have (and that was a two-part image as he claims, so it’s based on scams that have taken place).
I won’t go into depth on why else I know this is bogus, although most of you who follow me regularly will be able to spot the scammer’s pretty obvious mistakes.
And do you really think I only have 13 contacts? (Why is the number usually so low with these scams?)
Finally, out of curiosity, since I take my privacy seriously, I checked to see if there was a tracking pixel. There wasn’t, at least not in the software I use.
It’s a good idea to turn your images off when it comes to webmail (as they are on Zoho for me) in case future ones come with one. My email client filtered this as junk, as it surely is.
After I wrote the above post, I came across this page, where the scam is discussed. They only wanted $360â$600 a few months ago. The price has gone up, which suggests that it has worked. It appears that the defunct-password technique only surfaced this month.