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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘email’
26.01.2023
As if to prove my point about lies, Google spammed me right after my last post. In its footer:

No, I didnât. I logged into Google to see my settings. Sure enough:

As I always say, when it comes to computers, Iâm right, theyâre wrong. I have a better memory.
I unsubscribed:

But Iâm not signed up to âNews and tipsâ. Not on any menu. Remember, Google? What’s the point of managing my preferences when you don’t know how to use them?

Basically, theyâll spam you when they want regardless of what your settings are.
Whereâs the accountability here? Or are they desperate to shore up things now that the US Department of Justice has suddenly discovered it has some balls to take them on in an antitrust case?
Tags: 2023, competition law, email, Google, law, monopoly, spam, USA Posted in business, internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
12.12.2022
Kurt and I have very different brains, if you read this thread that I jumped in on.
I am sure he is right on how things should work. Get me talking about spacing and spelling, and I’d be in the same boat. Or the use of the word billion. I have my ideas on all of these, but not everyone follows them.
But in the Wikipedia article he cites, not everyone accepts that [email protected] and [email protected] are the sameâand certainly my own experience backs this up. You wonât be able to email me, for example, if you miss the punctuation. I also wonât be able to reach employees at some of the big media players on this planet.
I know Gmail would like us to think that a dotted and non-dotted email address are the same, and says as much, but there are just too many stories out there of people receiving emails not meant for them.
And you know what I think of Google: what it says and what it does have not always been the same thing.
Kurt believes all those people have fed in the wrong address for their emails to wind up with others. Itâs entirely possible, but for one tale that I linked to, on Reddit.
A former network engineer, Dan Hoyer, said, inter alia:
So, bottom line is that Gmail didn’t always ignore dots, and people who had dots but had that address first were merged with the non dotted accounts and started receiving email from someone else’s non dotted account in addition to their dotted version. (I am not sure, but I believe the reverse may have happened too if the non dotted name came first.)
And in the replies, Melissa Chapman says:
I am with you about the change. It 100% used to see dots and they were suggested to users as alternate forms when you created your gmail. Iâve gotten email for people with my same maiden name in California, New Jersey, Minnesota, and most recently France. And not just junk mail, but Paypal, church tithes, and utilities. Itâs frustrating that Google completely denies that this is the case! I donât use my older email much, but I also wonder if the other user has some access or gets some emails. Like with Paypal, they had confirmed their email to create the account!
Now, if Melissa is telling the truth, then there is an issue with Gmail, where someone else can get your emails. If what Kurt says is right, then Melissaâs claim about the Paypal account’s verification by another user is impossible if someone else did not register a variant of her address on Gmail separately, and was told that it was accepted.
With respect, if someone is ignoring certain claims, itâs probably because they donât want to open their minds to the possibility that their belief system is wrong. I remember that from an earlier Google experienceâand what kicked off my de-Googling in 2009. As I said, I accept Kurt’s position on how things should beâbut in practice not everyone is strict about things, and the computer world is as rife with examples as any other.
Tags: 2022, bugs, email, Gmail, Google, Mastodon, technology Posted in internet, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
09.09.2022
Big thanks to Petra on Mastodon for this one.
Donât discount us non-techs. When we come to you, weâve often done a lot of testing first before sounding the alarm. And often we are right.
Just like I was right with Vox when I could only get a compose window on select days over three months, or when Facebook forced an anti-malware program on us when we didnât have malware. This one, however, takes the cake, and I have to agree with Petra on her assessment that itâs her favourite ânon technical user with the absurd bug is rightâ tale.
The author of the story, Trey Harris, has given me permission to republish it here. (Here’s the original.) I have only made slight alterations for style (e.g. using the right ellipses and dashes that werenât available to him, and italicizing where he might have had all caps) but I have not changed any of Treyâs words. Please note the link to the FAQ at the end.
From: Trey Harris <[email protected]>
Here’s a problem that sounded impossible ⊠I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. 🙂 The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining.
I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.
âWe’re having a problem sending email out of the department.â
âWhat’s the problem?â I asked.
âWe can’t send mail more than 500 miles,â the chairman explained.
I choked on my latte. âCome again?â
âWe can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,â he repeated. âA little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther.â
âUm ⊠Email really doesn’t work that way, generally,â I said, trying to keep panic out of my voice. One doesn’t display panic when speaking to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like statistics. âWhat makes you think you can’t send mail more than 500 miles?â
âIt’s not what I think,â the chairman replied testily. âYou see, when we first noticed this happening, a few days ago âŠâ
âYou waited a few days?â I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice. âAnd you couldn’t send email this whole time?â
âWe could send email. Just not more than âŠâ
â⊠Five hundred miles, yes,â I finished for him, âI got that. But why didn’t you call earlier?â
âWell, we hadn’t collected enough data to be sure of what was going on until just now.â Right. This is the chairman of statistics. âAnyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it âŠâ
âGeostatisticians âŠâ
â⊠Yes, and she’s produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can’t reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius.â
âI see,â I said, and put my head in my hands. âWhen did this start? A few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that time?â
âWell, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it. But I called him, and he said he didn’t touch the mail system.â
âOK, let me take a look, and I’ll call you back,â I said, scarcely believing that I was playing along. It wasn’t April Fool’s Day. I tried to remember if someone owed me a practical joke.
I logged into their department’s server, and sent a few test mails. This was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to my own account was delivered without a hitch. Ditto for one sent to Richmond, and Atlanta, and Washington. Another to Princeton (400 miles) worked.
But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles). It failed. Boston, failed. Detroit, failed. I got out my address book and started trying to narrow this down. New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence (580 miles) failed.
I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity. I tried emailing a friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle. Thankfully, it failed. If the problem had had to do with the geography of the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken down in tears.
Having established thatâunbelievablyâthe problem as reported was true, and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file. It looked fairly normal. In fact, it looked familiar.
I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory. It hadn’t been alteredâit was a sendmail.cf I had written. And I was fairly certain I hadn’t enabled the âFAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES â option. At a loss, I telnetted into the SMTP port. The server happily responded with a SunOS sendmail banner.
Wait a minute ⊠a SunOS sendmail banner? At the time, Sun was still shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8 was fairly mature. Being a good system administrator, I had standardized on Sendmail 8. And also being a good system administrator, I had written a sendmail.cf that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark codes that had been used in Sendmail 5.
The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the dregs of my now-cold latte. When the consultant had âpatched the server,â he had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so doing downgraded Sendmail. The upgrade helpfully left the sendmail.cf alone, even though it was now the wrong version.
It so happens that Sendmail 5âat least, the version that Sun shipped, which had some tweaksâcould deal with the Sendmail 8 sendmail.cf, as most of the rules had at that point remained unaltered. But the new long configuration optionsâthose it saw as junk, and skipped. And the sendmail binary had no defaults compiled in for most of these, so, finding no suitable settings in the sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero.
One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the remote SMTP server. Some experimentation established that on this particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.
An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched. An outgoing packet wouldn’t incur a router delay until hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a lightly loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays.
Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:
$ units
1311 units, 63 prefixes
You have: 3 millilightseconds
You want: miles
* 558.84719
/ 0.0017893979
âFive hundred miles, or a little bit more.â
For those wanting to nitpick, Trey has written this FAQ with his answers.
I’m grateful for people like Trey, who actually investigate, even when what we say sounds totally implausible.
Tags: 2022, email, Mastodon, North Carolina, social media, technical support, technology, USA Posted in internet, technology, USA | 6 Comments »
22.12.2021
This was somewhat disappointing.
This chap contacts me, seemingly wanting permission to repost our Instagram images. His personal info has been removed.
Hello there,
We have reviewed your page and we truly loved your work!
Weâd like to repost your pictures on our profile. Our account is [redacted] and we have over 200.000 followers. If our followers see your work a large number of them are extremely likely to follow you.
I hope this sounds great to you since we are convinced you are going to receive a lot of new fans from this.
Would you like to be published on our page?
All the best,
I realize this was a form email but I thought: how courteous that they ask permission first. So many just steal your work. I felt they should be complimented on doing the right thing.
Dear [redacted]:
Thank you for reaching out but we must decline your offer. Our work is licensed for our use only, and we cannot permit it to be reposted. We truly appreciate your asking us first and for doing the right thing.
Kind regards,
Jack Yan
Publisher, Lucire
Seems their email system is set up assuming that all replies are positive, because I next get this:
I appreciate you getting back to us!
We have delivered many sponsored shoutouts and the results were always terrific. When we saw your Instagram profile we were confident you would get the same results. You can choose the photos for the promotion yourself or we can help you out with that.
We guarantee at least 500 new followers with just one picture. With 3 published photos you will get at least 1500 new followers, and with 7 – more than 3500 new followers! If we don’t deliver these results, we will issue a full refund.
Packages:
1 shoutout – $39
3 shoutouts – $79
7 shoutouts – $159
And it goes on.
This doesnât deserve much more than:
Dear [redacted]:
I don’t know if you read my reply at 11.31 a.m. UTCâit seems like you haven’t. It’s a no.
Regards,
Jack
And a block of the schmuckâs domain on our server, plus two reports from us on Instagram for spamming.
I know youâre thinking: why did you even bother replying in the first place?
Well, usually when people send me unsolicited emails, theyâre not so stupid as to not read the replies. This Instagram scammer, whose followers are probably all fake anyway, had automated everything, and took things to the next level of laziness. And heâs a greedy bugger as well, wanting to use your work and charge you for their using it!
This is a sure way to ruin your reputation, and if you feel public policy would be served by my revealing their identity, Iâm very happy to do so.
Tags: 2021, business, email, Instagram, scam, social media, technology Posted in business, internet, technology | No Comments »
14.10.2021
I canât be the only person who does this. This is one of the few things that I do on Facebook. Removing off-Facebook activity is another.

1. Let me check my Facebook advertising preferences. Who has been uploading my private information to Facebook without my permission? Hmm, Ramp, @rampcard, thatâs new. Iâve never heard of you.

2. âThey uploaded or used a list to reach you.â I never gave you my details, so the fact youâre uploading them to a platform I disagree with offends me.
3. Therefore, Iâm going to click âDonât allowâ for both these options. You canât show me ads, and no one can use your list to do so, either. And Iâm just going to click âDonât allowâ for the second option just to limit things more. (The graphic is after Iâve done both.)

4. Just to make sure I never hear from you on this platform, Iâll block your page as well.

There are dozens of companies Iâve had to do this to. Netflix and Spotify were big offenders, but so are some of our government departments. Even places I like and shop with: if I havenât given you permission, then youâve earned yourself a block. I don’t want to hear from you via Facebook or Facebook products. Own goal is the applicable football term here.
Very few T&Cs around the place mention the uploading of private information to Facebook like this. Thereâs usually some mention of the like buttons and what they do, and tracking by Facebook Pixel, but not this.
Tags: 2021, advertising, email, Facebook, Netflix, privacy, social media, Spotify Posted in business, internet, marketing, technology, USA | 1 Comment »
09.09.2021
Refreshingly, Iâve noticed that my more recent blog posts havenât been about Big Tech as often. I havenât changed my views: the ones Iâve stated earlier still stand, and Google and Facebook in particular continue to be a blight on democracy and even individual mental health.
A lot of the posts were inspired by real-world usage of those websites, if you look back over the last decade. As I use them irregularly, and wish others were in the same boat, then thereâs little to report, unless I come across new revelations that I might have a say about.
Google is the search of last resort though it has a great translator; now that the news alerts donât even work, thatâs one fewer contact point with the online advertising monopolist. Facebook is good for monitoring who has breached my privacy by uploading my private data to the platform, and to delete off-Facebook activity (Facebook serves these pages at a ridiculously slow speed, you wonder if youâre on dial-up). Beyond that neither site has much utility.
My Instagram usage is down to once every two months, which means itâs halved since 2020, though I still keep an eye on Lucireâs account, which isnât automated.
I stay in touch with some friends on email and thereâs much to be said about a long-form composition versus a status update. Itâs the difference between a home-cooked meal and a fast food snack. And, of course, I have this blog to record things that might pique my interest.
Go back far enoughâas this blogâs been around 15 yearsâand I shared my musings on the media and branding. My blogâs roots were an offshoot of the old Beyond Branding blog, but I wanted to branch into my own space. A lot of my views on branding haven’t changed, so I haven’t reblogged about them. Each time someone introduced another platform, be it Vox or Tumblr, I found a use for it, but ultimately came back here. Just last week I realized that the blog gallery, which came into being because NewTumblâs moderators started believing in the Republic of Gilead, was really my substitute for Pinterest. It might even be my substitute for Instagram, if I can be bothered getting the photos off my phone.
I must say itâs a relief to have everything on my own domain, and while itâs not âsocialâ, I have to ask myself how much of Instagramming and social media updating ever was. Twitter, yes, to an extent. But oftentimes with Instagram I posted because I got joy from doing so, over trying to please an audience. Itâs why I never got that many followers, because it wasnât a themed account. And if doing what suits me at the time is the motive, then thereâs no real detriment to doing so in my own spaces. These posts still get hundreds of viewers each, probably more than what I got on Facebook or Instagram.
I donât know if this is a trend, since setting up your own space takes far more time than using someone elseâs. Paying for it is another burden others may wish to avoid. Nor do I have the latest stats on Facebook engagement, but when I did track it, it was heading south year on year. I do know that the average reach for an organic post continues to fall there, which is hardly a surprise with all the bots. Instagram just seems full of ads.
But in my opinion, fewer contact points with Big Tech is a good thing, and may they get fewer still.
Tags: 2021, Beyond Branding, Big Tech, blogosphere, email, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Medinge Group, Pinterest, social media, technology Posted in business, culture, interests, internet, technology | No Comments »
27.08.2021
A couple of years ago, friends in Wellington, who own a businessâletâs call it Xâwere approached by a US company with the same name, though in a slightly different industry.
They wanted my friends to give up their page name facebook.com/x to them, and suggested that they should be facebook.com/xnz.
No suggestion of payment, just a âyou should considerâ, and if I recall correctly, something to do with how much bigger they were.
This was a really strange argument from someone in the US where their cultureâs often based around the plucky individual taking on bigger players.
How many myriads or even millions did CondĂ© Nast pay to get style.com from Express all those years ago? If youâre that much bigger, maybe you could have afforded it? Or maybe you were just being cheeky, thinking you could get something for nothing. Well, not quite nothing. A little bit of bullying.
Basically, taking away all the legalese and wank designed to make my friends hesitate, the Americans were upset that someone got in there with a Facebook page name years (nine years, if I recall correctly) before they did. How dare these Kiwis!
âHow should we respond?â asked my friends.
âYou can either (a) ignore them or (b) tell them to go to hell,â I advised. I think they chose (a). After all, thereâs no point replying to one-sided rudeness.
Iâm reminded of this story because of emails from another US company recently and, again, stripping away the rudeness and implying I was a liar, boils down to them not really liking their First Amendment. Not when someone else exercises it fairly.
Americans arenât alone in being dicks about something but these particular two companies sure donât like other people doing things that they can equally do. They trotted out a level of rudeness from the outset that you seldom see from their country, where regular Americans try their best to be nice.
A third case was from the UK, where we received a threat from the agent of a fading celebrity whose crowning achievements were probably some soap opera and shooting for FHM in the 1990s. I donât recall the circumstances in depth but I can tell you that that woman has not had much coverage since, by us or any other publication. Choose the wrong people, and you flush your goodwill down the toilet. Who’d touch you now, when there are plenty more stories that we can pursue with fewer headaches?
I donât know where the rudeness comes from, but I presume itâs a superiority complex that hides the fact that their arguments bear little merit. The result is that they damage their brands or their client’s reputations in the process.
If you encounter it in business, then it’s a cinch that they don’t really have much to stand on. They feel bullying is their only means, because if they argued it rationally or faced the issue honestly they wouldn’t get what they want. It’s worth keeping an eye out for, and not waste your time on.
Tags: 2010s, 2021, bullying, business, correspondence, email, Facebook, friends, law, legalese, reputation, UK, USA Posted in business, culture, publishing, UK, USA | No Comments »
11.06.2021
After three messages I decided I would answer one of those Gmail users asking about advertorial. And from now on I’m just going to copy and paste this to anyone else asking, ‘Why won’t you answer me?’
Dear [redacted]:
Sorry, this is why I haven’t answered you (and this is not because of you, but everyone else who has been enquiring about the same thing for years):
http://jackyan.com/blog/2021/06/time-to-stop-entertaining-advertorial-enquiries-from-gmail/
Almost every time I answer one of these emails it leads nowhere, and I’ve answered hundreds over the last few years. What many of them have in common is Gmail. So to save time and energy I’m no longer entertaining link and advertorial requests coming from Gmail.
Even if it were one in twelve I’d be borderline OK (the ratio I had doing phone sales during a recession) but one in hundreds is just not worth it. Your industry has worn me and my colleagues down.
Sincerely,
Jack
I really don’t know why, in the 2020s, anyone would use Gmail, given its rather massive problem of allowing more than one person to use an email address. But I guess if you use Google, you’re not too concerned about privacy, with the endless stories on this topic out there. It shouldn’t then matter if someone else with a similar address can read your emails.
Tags: 2020s, 2021, business, email, Gmail, Google, privacy Posted in business, internet, marketing | No Comments »
07.06.2021

Iâm not exactly proud of this, but last month I finished replying to all my emails from 2005.
That year I was stuck in Auckland for an extra day due to the airport there being fogged in. I said to another traveller, âWell, I wonât catch up on emails now till the end of the year.â He looked at me as though I was kidding. Except I was being unduly optimistic since it took 16 years to finish replying to everyone.
Today I replied to the last one from 2006, and fortunately, the AOL address appears to be current.
I feel like Iâm Ringo Starr in that early Simpsons episode who insisted on replying to all his Beatles fan mail personally, even though it was now the 1990s.
I never had the quantity he had, but the pattern wasnât particularly healthy: new emails would come in, Iâd have to reply to those, and non-urgent ones got pushed up the inbox.
These old emails were actually very nice and courteous ones, so they werenât of subjects or by writers whom I was trying to avoid.
The writer of the first one had since retired but I still tracked him down to apologize, as I have done with the second who, as far as I can tell, remains active.
I felt that at the least they deserved the courtesy of a reply, even if my timing was lousy.
Why am I blogging about this? Probably to tell others not to follow my example. And to get off social media, which Iâm sure eventually played a part in further delays. Why poke about on some tiny phone keyboard when you can structure your day better with a desktop machine and type more efficiently?
I have some fond memories of dial-up and not being constantly connected because you planned the emails you needed to send out. Your imagination could be fuelled by your offline time. We have to make the decision to get offline and take responsibility for how we spend our time. I suspect that is what I am rediscovering these days, including reading paper books more than I used to. Iâm sure thereâs a resurgence of printed matter lying in wait as people tire of the division and mindlessness of some of the most popular websites on our planet right now. And itâll be the trendy young people, those who see from our example what a waste of time these sites are, whoâll drive it.
Tags: 2000s, 2005, 2006, 2021, business, email, internet, online, time management, youth Posted in business, culture, internet, technology | No Comments »
12.09.2020
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.
Tags: 2020, bugs, email, Eudora, Microsoft Windows, office, software, Zoho Posted in business, New Zealand, technology | 1 Comment »
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