Don’t send HTML-only newsletters

Tuesday, 2 October 2007

Does your organisation send out email newsletters to your customers or prospects? If so, here’s a tip.

Ebay phishing scam

Friday, 10 August 2007

Last weekend, I got one of those “unpaid item reminder” emails from what looked on the surface to be the automated Ebay system. Here’s how I immediately recognised it as a phishing scam:

The "To" message header says "undisclosed-recipients". No personal email addressed to you would ever be sent to "undisclosed-recipients" because it’s a sure sign that it’s a bulk email addressed to a bunch of other people too.
The "X-Mailer" message header says "Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00". Since when would any business, especially one the size of Ebay, use Outlook Express?
Because my email client is configured to ignore HTML, all I could see in the body of the message was a single sentence which says "this message does not have a plain text part". I don’t know of anyone other than rank amateurs or spammers who send HTML-only mail.

These people are about as dumb as dodos. I wonder how much money they made last week?

Simple HTML chart

Saturday, 16 June 2007

One of our readers recently observed that we don’t seem to be using any images to draw our barcharts and wondered how it was done.

Getting the client IP address

Tuesday, 5 June 2007

We’ve seen plenty of PHP scripts that rely on the $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] variable when trying to establish the IP address of the client computer. The problem with this approach is that if your visitor is behind a corporate firewall or proxy, then the above will actually be the IP of the firewall or proxy, not the visitors computer.