Serendipitous altruism

Spam from Gmail accounts has appeared at least three years ago. Two years ago it caused Gmail servers to hit Spamcop’s database. But only now am I starting to notice it on my systems. My existing antispam arsenal may have protected me so far, but now I receive three or four illegitimate messages a day from that source, which is more than I tolerate.

Those messages have valid domain key signatures which lower their Spamassassin score enough to pass them as ham. If Google does not police its mail service better, then domain key signatures will become more than useless. A signature is only as good as its authority.

Meanwhile I will probably have to weight down the negative scores added through Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::DomainKeys.

I’m not particularly fond of new year’s greetings, but this time I stumbled upon some randomly incident inspiration in the form of Babatunde Olatunji‘s 1959’s song… “Odun de” means “Happy new year” and the lyrics “Odun de ire” mean “good fortune in the new year” in the Yoruba language.

So in lieu of seasonal electronic and dead tree spam, here is something from Baba to start your new year on…

Yesterday is history.
Tomorrow is a mystery.
And today?
Today is a gift.
That’s why we call it the present.

— Babatunde Olatunji

Owners of and AOL Instant Messenger can now use the service from Gmail. You may be surprised to learn that I consider that this is bad news. All the hype about interoperability between the two networks is just that : hype. This is not interoperability, this is just using Google as a multi-protocol client. In short, it merely hides the problem under the rug and further legitimates the fragmentation of the instant messaging world. I expected something more ambitious from Google. I thought that by opening their network to the Jabber galaxy, Google had made a statement in support of interoperability and open networks. But apparently this was just a way to embrace their competitors. I hope that users will some day understand the value of openness and demand it from their suppliers. They once did it for email and for internetworking – let’s hope the miracle happens again for instant messaging. Meanwhile, make sure that friends don’t let friends use closed networks !