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My parents have had a small business Web site for about 6 years. They’ve had the same email address since they started, and they have had their email configured so that any email sent to their domain gets dumped into their main mailbox. Last time I visited I set them up with Bayesian filtering and turned on their ISP’s default SpamAssassin install for them and thought it would get them through. When I got there this time, I was surprised to see that literally hundreds of spam messages were making it past SpamAssassin, and that their Bayesian filter wasn’t picking up the slack, mainly because they weren’t diligent about training it. They had all but given up on email because it was nearly impossible to sift through the thousands of bad emails to get to the few emails that weren’t junk, and I’m sure it hurt their business. The first thing I did was turn off the feature that forwards all emails to a domain to one mailbox. I felt like that was offering no value since they only used one address anyway, and it was probably upping their spam count significantly. A day or so after I did that, they literally got several thousand spam messages in one day, and many of them were repeats. I had also created a new mailbox for them, and set things up so that only emails from people in their address book were forwarded from the old mailbox to the new one. This at least gave them a place to look for messages that they knew to be good, they just had to delete all of the spam every day in the old mailbox. The other thing I did was remove their email address from their Web site and put up a contact form instead. I’ve never considered this sort of thing to be good design, but if you give up checking your email due to spam anyway, then drastic measures are required. Ultimately, we wound up deleting their old mailbox completely and sending a notification of their address change to everyone in their address book. Now they have a nice pristine inbox, but they suffer from the fact that anyone who knew their old email address and didn’t get the update on the new one is left out in the cold. Spam is a painful problem for me to manage for myself, but it’s something I can deal with. My parents aren’t so lucky. There’s no question that spam has cost them business, and given that their email address has changed, it may cost them more. They’re not really equipped to deal with it at all, and are fortunate to have me around to sort of manage the problem. I don’t know what other small businesses who don’t have somebody familiar with fighting spam do to cope with the spam problem at all. I don’t know where all this is heading, but I’m losing confidence in filtering as a good solution for most people. It’s great for me, but for my parents it’s a total loss. Today it looks like the best approach is to guard your email address like your most prized possession, which is sort of contrary to logic when you’re in business. ...

I’ll be travelling for Christmas, but I wanted to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas (or happy holidays for those of you who just see this as a couple of involuntary days off). I’ll be back at it in a few days. Interesting fact of the trip: I’m bringing 5 different rechargers.

MobileWhack has a list of predictions about the rumored upcoming phone from Apple. As I’ve mentioned before, the iPod will one day be killed by mobile phones with enough data storage to carry around your music collection. The article’s author offers this as the primary reason why Apple must enter the mobile phone business. I’m inclined to agree.

Did you know that all of the indecency complaints filed with the FCC come from members of one organization? Me either.

Here’s how Tom Friedman ends this week’s column, which is about how horrible the insurgents in Iraq are: As is so often the case, the statesman who framed the stakes best is the British prime minister, Tony Blair. Count me a "Blair Democrat." Mr. Blair, who was in Iraq this week, said: "Whatever people's feelings or beliefs about the removal of Saddam Hussein and the wisdom of that, there surely is only one side to be on in what is now very clearly a battle between democracy and terror. On the one side you have people who desperately want to make the democratic process work, and want to have the same type of democratic freedoms other parts of the world enjoy, and on the other side people who are killing and intimidating and trying to destroy a better future for Iraq." Are there lots of people pulling for the insurgents? I suspect that lots of Arabs are, being that they’re fighting a Western army that invaded and is militarily occupying an Arab country, but are many Americans? Are people romanticizing the insurgency? I guess some people are, but I don’t really run into them. I think a lot more people who are “against” the war are just wondering what the hell we’re going to do at this point to support the people who want real freedom for Iraq. The first question is, how many are there? The second question is, how do we get from where we are today to something resembling a functioning democracy? If the plan is “hold elections of some kind and keep killing insurgents,” I don’t like our chances. I also don’t know of a better plan. So really all that’s left for me, and probably many other people, is disgust that we got ourselves into this mess. Democracy for Iraqis would be a wonderful and powerful thing, same for Iranians, and Syrians, and Kuwaitis, and Zimbabweans, and Russians, for that matter. But I think we can now regard the effort to bring democracy to Iraq through an invasion and an undermanned occupation as a complete failure. Things have not stopped getting worse since the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled over in April, 2003. How do we expect the same people who can’t make things stop getting worse to make things better? Nobody should romanticize the insurgency in Iraq, but it’s still a fact of life. The insurgency was an inevitable response to foreign occupation. The fact that it has flourished is directly attributable to the unwillingness of the Bush administration to put enough boots on the ground. So now how to get rid of it? I don’t think that the odds favor us in a war of attrition. ...

So the online game World of Warcraft is broken tonight, and it looks like a Web application running on Tomcat that’s built using the Spring framework is the culprit. These guys clearly need to familiarize themselves with the exception handling capabilities built into Spring so that they don’t spew their stacktraces at their customers. That’s just common dignity. Interestingly, it looks like they’re sending Oracle the wrong password, which is just weird for a production application. ...

The New York Review of Books has a piece on the coverage of the war in Iraq in the run up to the election in November. No surprises here, they find that news outlets pulled their punches for fear of persecution by people who beat them with the bias stick.

Here’s yet another urgent plea for help. I am working with someone who’s using a COM object from Microsoft called ServerXMLHTTP to call a Web service. I want to be able to write a simple console program to call a Web service in the same manner they’re calling it. Here’s the line of code they use in VB to instantiate the object: set xml = Server.CreateObject(“MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP.4.0”) The Server.CreateObject() method is an ASP/IIS thing, and I want to be able to run this code from a regular VB console program. Anyone know of a way to instantiate this object outside the context of IIS? As is my custom, I’ve created a QuickTopic. Update: Problem solved, I love you guys. (I’ve been working on this one for months, sporadically.) ...

Have you ever heard of a marketing executive that supported spending less money on marketing? Cindy McCaffrey, Google’s departing VP of marketing, deserves a spot in some kind of hall of fame.

Looks like the iPod Photo naysayers were right.