Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Hacking ivy!

I managed to brush my wrist over something.  Whether it was a poison ivy leaf or some residual oil on a piece of wood, I don't know.  Nasty patch on my wrist, a few random spots on my body.  It could have been a lot worse.  The wrist is localized enough to keep covered and not spread.   It's still a nuisance.

On a totally different note, I am finally the victim of an email hack.  Joy.

Ages ago, (when my ego was larger - stop laughing) I setup my own domain.  I grabbed the first ISP that came along, and wound paying too much and getting very little - in diskspace, certainly.  It was such a tiny allotment, I created a Hotmail  account to move big files, and register various websites (forums, etc.)

I moved the personal account elsewhere, and kept it for personal email.  But, my Hotmail account got hacked the other night.  I had gotten lazy and occasionally dropped an address into the Contacts list.  Spammer went through the list and spammed some folks.  I changed the password, wiped out the Contacts list, but today I still got blocked out.  The only reason I want in now is to delete the account.

I've setup two Gmail accounts.  One personal, one for everything else.  I'm going to ween off the domain thing.  It doesn't cost much now, but with the blog serving as a hub, I don't really feel like I need a domain anymore.  Or, maybe I'll keep it for the redirect and just stop with the email there.  I have time to think about it, I just renewed a few weeks previous.

I'm liking the interface and concepts of Gmail; labeling emails instead of foldering them - allows multi-tag on a single email, instead of deciding which folder to keep it in.  Archiving and lots of space to keep years worth of email (if you want, I like to run light with email folders.)  And, it's Google, so searching for old emails will be a cinch, especially with labeling and other meta-data.

In theory, it will all work wonderfully...until the next hack.

1 comment:

  1. Getting hacked really bites. I'm sorry it's happened to you. My work email got hacked (mostly through my own carelessness) about 10 months ago. I lost all emails, including some important ones from students, and the hackers used my account to send out thousands of spam emails before the university locked the account. I was getting hate emails from people I'd never heard of who were spammed for months. You might check to see if the admin for the host server locked you out because the account was being used for spam.

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