Technology: August 2003 Archives

Most viruses that replicate themselves through e-mail forge the from: field of their messages. Usually they take a random address, or pick one from your address book or web cache. Therefore, a virus appearing to come from jeroen@example.com, rarely really originates from this address.

I can image that some users don't know this, and when they receive a virus from me they send me a reply with a warning that I have a virus. Usually I explain these people the story above and tell them --- of course after checking that my anti-virus software is up-to-date --- that I don't have a virus. No problem for me.

What I don't understand is that some people who are responsible for really big mail servers also don't understand that viruses forge headers, and have their servers configured in such a way that they reply to me. Of course they have the right to block a message with a virus to protect their customers. But please don't bother me with these messages. I can assure you that I am not the one sending these messages; just check the mail headers and you will see that they originate from a completely different server.

This morning somebody who apparently had visited my site cached a virus and started sending out the virus in my name. Luckily for him, his provider scans all incoming SMTP mail and intercepted all messages. Instead of simply not accepting these messages, they had configured procmail to send a warning to the address mentioned in the from-field (me) including the virus!!!!! As a result, my inbox is flooded with viruses from this server (mail.infosys.tuwien.ac.at).

Once again, none of my computers is infected with a virus.

I don't notice the pop-up advertisements on this site anymore, since the browsers I am normally using (Mozilla & Firebird) block them, but I know that they irritate quite some visitors of this site. But as they say: you get what you pay for. I pay nothing for hosting this site, and in return I'll have to accept that my provider adds these horrible things to my pages. :-(

But I have good news for you: today I arranged a new hosting provider, and since I am paying a little bit, they will host my site banner free!!!!!!. I could have upgraded my current account, but I have found a provider who gives me a lot more for less!!! Here are the specs:

• 75mb disk space
• 5gb/month bandwidth
• Unlimited e-mail accounts
• Unlimited FTP accounts
• Unlimited MySQL 4 databases
• Unlimited subdomains
• 4 mailing lists
• One domain
• PHP 4.3.1
• CGI-Bin (Perl)
• POP3, SMTP, IMAP, & Webmail
• Unlimited e-mail forwarders
• Unlimited autoresponders
• crontab
• ...

For me, the biggest advancements are the MySQL database, unlimited POP3 boxes and PHP. I don't know anything about PHP, but I have seen a lot of handy code that I would like to copy & paste in my templates. Another benefit is that without the banner code, my pages will contain valid XHTML 1.1 code.

For the coming period, I'm afraid that I will still serve my site from the old location with pop-ups, since I want to set up the new server really, really good, and like to fix some design flaws in the current site.

Be patient, dear visitors