Richard Kettlewell FAQ

1. Why a FAQ for a person?

I decided I needed a FAQ about myself after being asked the same question three times in two days.

2. What is "rjkxwrits"?

I'm a fairly heavy computer user, and if I type (or mouse!) for too long at a stretch then I tend end up in pain. The obvious answer is to take regular breaks - but my mind isn't very good at noticing that I've been typing away like mad for three hours at a stretch, so I use a computer program calls xwrits to remind me to stop using the computer for a bit.

When on an IRC channel, it might seem a bit rude to go quiet for five minutes at a stretch without any kind of indication of what's going on. So I sometimes change my nick to "rjkxwrits" just before such a break, and change it back to "rjk" afterwards.

See http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/xwrits/ for more details about xwrits. If you do a lot of keyboard and/or mouse work and use some kind of UNIX-like system then I strongly recommend it. For other systems there's a list of similar products at http://www.tifaq.org/software.html. (URLs correct at time of writing.)

3. What's with the odd email addresses?

My USENET postings have some quite odd email addresses in the header. These aren't spam traps in the usual sense: no editing is required to reply to my postings. Rather, they are intended to give me information about the ways in which spammers (and anyone else, for that matter) come by my email address, in particular which header field they read it from and which newsgroup they read it in.

My conclusions so far are:

1. People are currently actively harvesting USENET for spam targets (so if you believe that address-mangling is the answer, you should continue to do it - though I don't personally agree that it is the answer) as well as using address lists compiled in the past
2. Some address harvesters have trouble parsing addresses correctly; some of the spam I receive has early portions of the address missing. This suggests a possible way of detecting some spam, though there is a risk of false positives from senders of legitimate mail who use seriously broken software.
3. From: addresses are favoured over Reply-To: addresses, though the broken addresses mentioned above make it hard to be certain about this. I will probably change the address format so as to be able to gather more accurate information.

If the hypothesis that From: addresses are strongly (or even entirely) favoured over Reply-To: addresses is true, then this suggests an easy way to avoid spam without missing legitimate mail - though again, broken software may lead to false positives, and widespread use of this tactic might lead to a change in spammer behaviour rendering it ineffective.

See my page on email addresses for more information on this subject.

4. How's the job search going?

I found a job, thanks.

5. Who is Grob Vigilant?

That would be telling.

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