So, how is Hotmail doing with its spam problems ? This very issue has come up innews.admin.net-abuse.email recently, so let's take a look and see.

This week we accepted exactly one email from Hotmail, which may or maynot have been spam.

Also this week, we refused 84 messages from Hotmail that came fromnon-Hotmail email addresses, mostly msn.com but including domains like'ukwiningnotice.com', 'usm2005lot.

First question: why bother, apart from idle curiosity? For a start,I'm interested in knowing how worthwhile it is to do things that helpa specific search engine.

Search engines care a lot about their popularity, with the result thatyou can't really trust anything they say about it. I'm not sure youcan trust any other source of information, and to get solid data youprobably have to pay money for it.

Besides, I don't care about global search engine popularity

The other thing we had to do the other day was name the new server we were bringing up, which is often harder thanit looks.

Good names machine are important because they let you tell thingsapart. This means that good names have to be different from eachother, so you can avoid fun games like 'was it ws3-05 or ws5-03 thathad the problem?'

People usually resort to generic names like 'ws5-03' for two reasons:they

I just gave someone at work this advice today, so I might as wellrepeat it here. We were bringing up a new machine, a nice dualprocessor server with a hardware RAID-1, and I suggested to him thatbefore he even thought about putting it into production he take theopportunity to yank one of the drives and see what happened.

There are occasions where you would do this to a machine inproduction, but not very many. New hardware (or idle hardware) isabout your only chance

People like to talk about reliability and availability, and throwaround terms like '5-nines availability' and so on. You may have heardthis from server salescritters (alongside their attempts to sell you redundant power supplies ).

At the same time, what the terms really imply is not intuitive andis often surprising, especially at the high end.

The following chart comes from my co-worker John Calvin:

One of the best things I've ever done to improve my web browsingexperience is very simple: I turned Javascript off almost from itsintroduction.

Turning Javascript off has a host of benefits, because Javascript onweb pages has always been primarily used either for evil or forflashy, distracting user interface elements. With it off I avoid allof that, including popups and links that hide where they're actuallygoing to. Among other advantages, this makes it much lessnerve-wracking to go to strange new

There's a lot of useful mailing lists out there; far too many toactively subscribe to, especially if they're all going to funnel intoyour inbox. And often you're not sure how interested you're going tobe in a particular mailing list, or it's only interesting some of thetime or for a few discussions. Plus, let's be honest here: most emailclients don't deal very well with lots of email messages.

Enter gmane.org , where

This week we received 12,111 email messages from 242 different IPaddresses. Our SMTP server handled 61,080 sessions from 6,951different IP addresses. Both email volume and session volume is upfrom last week ,despite us being cut off from Level 3 customers for part of the week.(The University of Toronto gets core connectivity from Cogent, and youmay have heard about the spat Cogent and Level 3 had between Wednesdayand Friday.)

Overall connections

When we talk about 'support', especially things like 'vendor support',I think that there are actually two general things that are gettinglumped under the same label: issues that you could have dealt with onyour own if you knew enough, and things that are broken.

Although I don't have really good names for them, let's call the firstsort of issue 'troubleshooting' and the second sort 'support'.

Unless the vendor dropped the ball on their documentation (which iscertainly