There is evidence that much spam may come from compromised personal PCs.

Our company mail servers use a number of techniques to filter spam. The single most effective is known as 'grey-listing'.

In simple terms, when we get a request to transfer mail to us from an unknown (not 'white-listed') domain, our servers says 'sorry, a bit busy right now to deal with you, can you try again in a few mooments' and we make a note ('grey-list') the sender.

If the sender is a properly configured mail system, it will retry, usually in about ten minutes. When they try again, we spot them on our 'grey-list' and let the mail through.

A compromised PC will never attempt a retry, neither will most Spam outfits.

This technique stops about 90% of mail reaching us.

There's a lot of crap flying around the Internet mail system.

iiwarm, that is indeed a fairy story. Some early worms might conceivably have contained what in normal situations would be considered a bug, i.e. stopping if the first email address was unrecognisable, but no self-respecting worm would do that.

'self-respecting worm' :-)

I only allow self respecting worms onto my PC

Does anybody know how long DNS propogation of a new active domain should take?

I've been quoted 72 hours, but that seems a bit steep to me.

I have had one that took about a day and another that took about 3 days.

OK, thanks Haystack. I'll twiddle my thumbs for a bit longer then. Strange that it should take so long.

Hilary
Try this. It gives you an idea of how well the propogation is going.

http://www.whatsmydns.net/

Thanks for that link, Haystack.

Just bought myself one of these beasts.

Acer AspireM3802

It's got two 1Tb HDs. What I can't decide is how I should best use the drives? Any suggestions.

I'm also thinking of adding twin monitors - any suggestions about which graphics card I should use? I don't play games on my PC - just used for business and trading.

DNS propagation is an inexact science. Much of it will occur pretty rapidly but it can take days to filter through to the far corners of the Internet. Hil, your 72 hours is reasonable - and there's nothing you can do to accelerate it anyway. :-)

SC, how are the drives set up now? You could just use them as basic disks and perhaps use one as the main disk and the other for storage or backups. Or you can convert them to dynamic disks which gives you the options to combine them to appear as one big drive etc.

Dual monitors are no problem with most fairly cheap graphics cards. I put one of these in for someone recently to run dual 22" monitors, and it worked very well. Rubbish for games but works well with normal desktop stuff, and is good for HD video too.

Thanks Jon.

I don't know how the HDs are set up at present. The PC is still in the box. I think it might be best to keep one as the main drive and occasionally back up onto the second drive. I cannot see me ever filling that size of disc, esecially as so much data is in the cloud now. But then we all thought 640k system memory was massive!

That graphics card looks fine - just what I'm wanting, not expensive, and it's good to know of someone who uses it the way I want to. One DVI and one VGA, whereas my monitors are both VGA, but I'll just buy a DVI - VGA converter.

Films and or video clips, music and books for starters.

You could even start a collection or two with that amount of storage.

How about some 'Kindle' books for PC? They have a 'Top 100 Free' and a 'Top 100 Paid' in the 'Kindle Book Store' at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Books-Kindle/b/ref=sv_kinc_1?ie=UTF8&node=341689031

(Scroll down to the RHS)

By the way, you first need to do the free software download, 'Kindle for the PC' which is available from the same location. Once registered you can also put these onto your Kindle or a Netbook or Laptop if you have one.



I see they also have Kindle subscriptions for several newspapers too, so you could even start a collection of these, if you want.

Jon.
That looks just like my Matrox dual head which
has the extension to fit into an AGP slot.
Will that card fit a more modern PCI slot?
Tks.

Tyketto, the card from Ebuyer is for PCI Express which is a newer standard than PCI. Most PC's sold in the last 4 years or so (at a guess) will have PCI Express slots. It would not work in a PCI or AGP slot though.

Thanks Jon
I just checked and found that out.
Unfortunately the comp I was wanting to
expand ha s only PCI expansion slots.
Looks as though I'll have to go to E whatsit.

There are a few PCI gfx cards about still but they are rare. This one looks like it might be OK - http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/512MB-PNY-8400-GS-PCI-64-Bit-1000MHz-GDDR2-567MHz-GPU-D-Sub-Dual-Link-DVI-I-S-Video Is the PC quite old?

Kayak etc

Just spoke to my friend. She ran spybot but gave up on it after one and a half days!

She then changed her email from MS Hotmai to her isp and is not using webmail and problem seems to have gone away.

Tks for assistance

Thanks Exec. I still prefer parchment for my reading, but might stick a few films on there. I should also upload all my family videos I think. That'll eat the space up!