Until recently, my problems with junk email far exceeded the norm. On a typical day, I would get several hundred junk messages, sometimes approaching 1000. Still worse, despite my best efforts at using various junk mail filters, many of these worthless missives evaded detection and wound up in my main Inbox.

Long ago, I accepted what I thought was my fate and routinely spent a small but annoyingly significant part of my day flushing junk mail down the virtual trash chute. If there was a better solution, I was too busy to figure it out.

Until last week.

About a week ago, I woke up and, while still rubbing my eyes and making coffee, went to check my email. Entourage (my email client) started chugging and informed me that it was “getting messages.” After a brief wait, the number of messages to be downloaded appeared: 10,387. My jaw dropped. What the…?

At first, I assumed it was an error in Entourage. It wasn’t. I was indeed downloading over 10,000 email messages. Yes, ten thousand. It took well over 30 minutes just for the emails to download.

It turned out that almost all of the emails were bounce-back messages — those automated replies stating that an email you sent was not delivered for some reason. Of course, I hadn’t actually sent out all the failed emails. What had happened was that some spammer was putting my email address in the header of their junk messages. As most of their spam went undelivered (sent to non-existent addresses that they just guessed might exist), I began getting the bounce-back emails alerting me to the failures. [That spammers can get away with something like this without being castrated on the spot remains a problem for Congress to address. But that was not my immediate concern.]

I had had enough. I was determined to put a stop to this onslaught and get my junk email under control.

The key, I decided, was to prevent these emails from ever getting to the point where they download to my Mac. I wanted to stop them at the source. Although I have several email addresses (such as a gmail and a .mac address), the one causing almost all my problems was the one associated with my personal Web domain. I use pair.com as my Web host for the domain. So I contacted them for advice.

Their initial reply was disheartening, to say the least: there was nothing they could do. “We are not able to stop this because the spammers are not using any of our services.” In an apparent attempt to cheer me up a bit, they added that I needn’t worry about getting into trouble: I would not be held responsible for sending out the spam. Great news! That’s like, after being hit in the head with a baseball, being assured that you won’t be held liable for interfering with the play.

Happily, the pair.com people offered a further suggestion: “Eliminate your catch-all email addresses.”

That did it! I’ll explain the details in a moment. But let me cut right to the punch line: After following their advice, my junk email dropped down to almost zero. I could kick myself for not thinking of this before. I guess I just didn’t want to spend the time to figure out exactly what I needed to do. Until now.

But wait! If you’re hoping to use this solution to solve your own junk email problems, chances are you will be disappointed. The technique only works if your email address comes from a personal domain.

The details. When you sign up with a Web host, you are assigned one or more domains. Your domain name may be your-own-name.com, such as clarkkent.com. In this setup, you commonly have an almost infinite number of possible email addresses. You may choose clark@clarkkent.com as your official email address. But all messages sent to anything@clarkkent.com will be sent to you. For example, if an annoyed someone sends an email to butthead@clarkkent.com, it will arrive in your Inbox. This is what pair.com meant by a “catch-all” address.  

This setup actually has at least one practical advantage. You can assign different addresses for different uses, allowing for easy sorting of your email. For example, when you create an account at a Web site, you can use a site-specific email address, such as amazon@clarkkent.com. You can then set up a rule in your email client, directing what happens whenever email with that address is received. As a bonus, if a vendor should ever sell your email address to a spammer, you can easily identify the culprit — because the vendor’s name is the front part of the email address.

But there is a dark side to this email setup. Spammers may get a hold of your domain name and start sending emails to random addresses within that domain, such as jimmy@clarkkent.com and lois@clarkkent.com — hoping that at least one of them gets delivered. This was a large part of my daily junk mail problem. Further, as was the case with my 10,000 spam message disaster, they can send out email using your domain as the return address. In both cases, almost every email they send leads to a message arriving in your Inbox.

Web hosts typically offer a way to deal with this. In the case of pair.com, you can create “recipes.” These are rules that tell the mail server at pair.com what to do with your email before it is potentially sent to you. In the simplest case, you can set it up so that email addressed to any valid addresses (such as clark@clarkkent.com) gets delivered to you, but all other email is immediately deleted. The deleted email never shows up at your doorstep, so you don’t even have to worry about filtering it.

I confess that it made me more than a bit nervous when I selected “discard all e-mail by default” in pair.com’s email management settings. But after creating the needed recipes to act as exceptions to the default, it all worked as promised.

As I said, this solution may not apply to you. If you have an ISP-generated email address, such as clarkkent43@aol.com, this solution won’t work — because you don’t have multiple addresses under your control. But then, you probably aren’t getting 10,000 emails a day. However, if you are bothered by junk email at all, there a numerous other things you can do (check out this article for some good suggestions).

So that’s how I managed to reduce my junk email to near zero. I hesitated to post this blog entry; I didn’t want it to serve as a challenge to spammers to seek out a new line of attack. In the end, in the interest of spreading the good news, I decided to take my chances.

P.S. None of this has affected the spam I still receive as phony comments to this blog. That’s another kettle of fish; I’ll save that discussion for another day.

Mobile phone plans give you more monthly minutes than you will ever use, at a very reasonable cost. For a bit more, you can get practically unlimited text messaging as well. Many land-line phone plans come with unlimited calling within the United States. With each month, Web-based storage sites are offering more gigabytes of storage for less and less money (free in some cases). And although the analogy does not work perfectly here, I would point out that my TV uses Comcast Cable; there is no limit to how much TV I can watch per month.

And so it goes. As technology improves, it usually becomes cheaper; we get less and less limits on its use. This is a welcome trend — unless you are an Internet Service Provider such as Time-Warner, Comcast, or AT&T. They are seeking to start charging increased fees for people who use more bandwidth, as detailed in this San Francisco Chronicle article.

In some ways, this is the flip side of the Internet neutrality debate. The ISP’s initial approach has been to have fast and slow lanes for Internet data. Big corporations would pay hefty fees to have their Web site data travel in the fast lane, while most of the rest of us would be be restricted to the scenic route. This would affect end users no matter how much they paid per month: Apple’s Web site, presumably, would load lightning fast while John Doe’s personal blog might take a minute or more to load. This threatens the egalitarian structure of the Web — the same structure that allows small startups with little capital to become the next Google or YouTube. It would crush competition from small players. Even if Small Site A does something 10 times better than Big Site B, users may ignore Small Site A because of how much slower its site loads.

This approach has been severely criticized. And rightly so. With some luck, the approach may die altogether. Perhaps recognizing this, Internet Service Providers are seeking to increase their revenue from the opposite end of the spectrum: charge end users more based on how much bandwidth they use each month. The argument here is that there are Internet hogs, those 5% of users who are sucking up as much as 50% of the bandwidth. Why should someone who only uses the Internet to check their email, so the argument goes, pay the same as someone who downloads movies several times a day?

I admit to a bit of sympathy towards this argument — as I have discussed in a previous column. But only a bit.

First, I worry that this is largely a “straw man” argument. The ISPs claim to want to protect me from having my service slowed by “bandwidth hogs.” Well, I live in the SF Bay Area, certainly one of the densest concentrations of Internet users in the world. And I have rarely been bothered by a slowing down of my connection. Even when such slowdowns have occurred, they have been brief and the cause was usually a disruption in Comcast’s service (not any hogging of bandwidth). So where is the problem exactly? Who has been complaining about hog-induced slowdowns, beyond the ISPs themselves?

There is already tiered pricing for end-users, depending upon how fast a connection you want. Do we really need an additional set of tiers based on bandwidth? I suspect not.

I also worry about the “slippery slope” problem. Once a bandwidth-based tiered price structure is in effect, how long before ISPs modify it so that all but the lowest bandwidth users are paying more per month? It becomes sort of like “basic” Cable TV is today. It’s so “basic” that almost no one who signs up for cable sticks with only the basic plan. We all wind up paying more, often much more. Suggested ISP plans already describe charging increased rates for people using as little as 5GB/month. If ISPs are truly worried only about the upper 5% of users, why not limit price increases only to those 5%? Or look at it another way: Five years from now everyone may be using twice as much bandwidth as we use on average now. If a price structure is put in place based on today’s usage, we could all be paying twice as much in five years.

Finally, the idea that you may ultimately be charged on a $/GB basis (much like you pay for gasoline in $/gallon today) is truly scary. When you rent a movie from iTunes, you are already paying Apple a rental fee. One day, it could turn out that Comcast charges you more to download a movie than Apple charges you to rent it. Every time you want to watch a free video online, or do anything that uses any significant bandwidth, you’d have to start calculating whether or not it’s worth the cost in bandwidth. Ultimately, you may be forced to significantly restrict your use of the Web to keep your costs down. Or wind up paying your ISP a lot more dough. This would not be good — unless your name is Comcast or AT&T.

Some people may argue that the gasoline analogy is more appropriate than I might like. In these days of rising gas prices, we may restrict how often we drive to a movie theater, for example. No one argues that all drivers should be charged the same amount for gas every month no matter how much they drive. True enough. But oil is a scarce resource; we may even run of it in a few decades. We are not about to run out of Internet bandwidth. In fact, quite the opposite. In the decades ahead, as technology improves, we are likely to have more and more bandwidth to play with. The question is: Who will get to control what we pay for it?

I read the other day, in a New York Times article, that Grand Theft Auto IV “racked up first-week sales of $500 million.” This is a truly incredible statistic.

In contrast, take a look at the All-Time USA Box office numbers, as listed on IMDB. Titanic is number one at $600,779,824 and Star Wars in number 2 at $460,935,665. In other words, in one week, Grand Theft Auto IV surpassed the final U.S. gross ticket sales for every movie every made, except Titanic!

Now that’s impressive.

What’s almost as impressive, at least to me, is that I don’t know one person who actually owns the game. Now granted, I am not a youngster any more. And I don’t have much social interaction with people under 30. At least not of the sort where the subject of Grand Theft Auto is likely to crop up in the conversation.

Still, I would have thought that I would at least heard about a few people who had played the game. Nope. Or whose kids play the game. Not one. I confess that I too have never played the game. I don’t even own a game console (Wii, Xbox or PlayStation).

From this anecdotal “survey”, I am led to assume that the galactic sales of GTA IV derives almost entirely from teens and twenty-somethings. Actually, given that the game has an M rating, teenagers under 17 aren’t even supposed to be buying the game. Although I know the rating system is largely a farce, GTA IV’s rating presumably limit sales at least a wee bit. And still the game steamrolls across the landscape. Very very impressive indeed.

For the record, it’s not that I have no interest in games. Quite the contrary. It’s just that I haven’t had sufficient motivation to buy a game console. I have enjoyed playing games on my Mac over the years, including Halo and various Star Wars games. I have always preferred this to the alternative of investing $300 or more in a game console and having to hook it up to my TV — and then paying $60 or so for each new game. Only to have it all become obsolete a year or so later when the inevitable next generation console hardware is released.

But what do I know? Clearly, I am something of a dinosaur here.

I do know that games for the Mac aren’t getting much buzz these days — even among Mac owners. There was a time when the prospect of something such as the release of Halo for the Mac was a big deal. [Of course, for Halo, Bungie was purchased by Microsoft, which put development plans for a Mac version on hold for several years. But that's another story.] There was a time when the arrival of the latest Mac games made front-page headlines in the Mac press, not just a brief mention in a Games column somewhere. That time is gone. And the most popular games, such as Grand Theft Auto, never appear on a Mac. Often, they don’t appear on a PC either, at least not until long after the game has been available for consoles.

I do see a glimmer of good news here — at least for those of us with an iPhone. There’s a reasonable chance that, after the release of iPhone 2.0 software in July, games on the iPhone will become the next big thing — even surpassing devices such as Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP). With its use of a touchscreen and accelerometer, the iPhone offers a unique game environment, one that just might give it a critical competitive edge. At least I hope so. I would welcome being on the leading edge of games again, without having to buy a game console or stick an extra device in my pocket.

Here’s a true story.

My neighbor was in the market to replace his aging PC, running Windows XP. While he was debating what to get, I made a small effort to convince him to switch to a Mac (”It can run Windows when you need it and be a Mac when you don’t”). He has an iPhone and loves it; his daughter has a MacBook and he is impressed with it. All in all, he seemed ripe for a switch. Still, in the end, he chose to get a Dell PC with Windows Vista pre-installed.

At first, he was thrilled with his purchase. He could not believe how much faster the new machine was. His only lament was that he had waited as long as he did before upgrading.

Within a few days, however, his mood had changed. “I returned the computer,” he told me — with a sheepish look on his face. I was a bit surprised. Naturally, I wanted to know what had happened.

The first glitch was when he found that he couldn’t run his copy of FileMaker Pro 8 on his new PC. He was told that, in order to work under Vista, he would need to upgrade to FileMaker Pro 9. He did — at a cost of almost $200.

Next, he discovered that his old HP printer wouldn’t work with his new PC. Once again, the problem was a Vista conflict. The old driver for his printer was not compatible with Vista –– and HP did not intend to release an updated Vista-compatible driver. The advised solution was to get a new printer — at a cost of another $200.

Then came the last straw. He has two monitors, each a different brand. They both worked fine in tandem when connected to his old PC running XP. However, on his new Vista machine, he could only get one of them to work at a time. He was eventually told that Vista only permits dual displays if the two monitors are of the same or similar brand — and thus use the same driver software. His choice at this point was to get a new monitor or return his new PC. He chose the latter.

If you’re thinking this is where he switches to a Mac, you’d be wrong. He stuck with Dell. However, he wound up getting what Dell claimed to be the only PC they sell that still ships with XP.

My neighbor did not give up on Windows. At least not yet. He did say sayonara to Vista though. In this regard, his travails fit nicely with Apple’s recent “I’m a Mac” ads.

To be fair to Vista, some simpler, less expensive, solutions may have been possible (such as a universal driver for the printer or displays). I don’t know. And, although they happen less often, similar problems can happen with a Mac.

Still, listening to my neighbor’s woes with Vista, I couldn’t help thinking that I should have him contact Apple. Maybe he could replace John Hodgman as the PC in Apple’s ads.

It’s official. The iPhone 3G is here. Sort of here. Almost here.

It’s a dizzying and exciting time for iPhone users. Heck, it’s a great day for all Mac users, indeed for all computer and mobile phone users.

But there was more to today’s announcements than just the iPhone 3G. Much more. The information overload at the WWDC Keynote today was so great that it will be days before I can absorb it all.

The biggest news was, as everyone expected, the iPhone 3G — with 3G network support, GPS built-in for Maps, improved audio and a price as low as $199!

On the heels of this news, there was the announcement of a new me.com service (replacing Apple’s .mac service), offering enterprise-like capabilities for the “rest of us.”

Apple also revealed, in almost a throw-away comment, that it would be showing a sneak peak of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) later today — but just for developers attending the WWDC.

Added to all of this news were further details about the variety of new programs coming to the iPhone’s App Store, the newly announced ways to privately distribute iPhone applications (in particular an Ad Hoc option, useful for situations such as a professor who wants to distribute something just to his/her class), the new server-based notifications, the ability to view iWork and Office documents on your iPhone, and the previously-announced enterprise “push” features.

Whew! My head is still spinning.

Yet, there was one definite downer amidst all the excitement. The new iPhone 2.0 software and iPhone 3G will not be available until July 11.

Now, I am usually one to defend Apple when it comes to “unexpected delays.” My general position is…a year from now…what will we remember more…how great the iPhone 3G is or that it shipped a month later than we thought? The former. In the end, the delay won’t matter much. And I still believe this to be so.

But for today… I have to gripe just a little.

Come on, Apple! How long must we wait for your third-party iPhone software support? How many delays must we endure?

There were hints that Apple would be announcing such support back in September. When the big announcement finally came in October, all we got was a promise that the support was indeed coming. We would have to wait until February to find out the details. In February, we were disappointed to receive only a “road map” and an SDK from Apple. No software for end users was released. No real details were provided. The actual software, we were told, would not be available until June. Well, June is finally here. And now we are told to wait yet again. It will be July 11 before we can get our hands on iPhone 2.0.

It’s starting to feel like a “bait-and-switch” except that the switch is to just keep waiting instead of switching to some other more expensive product.

I’m sure this mild irritation will quickly wear off once July 11 rolls around. But for now, I am more than a bit bummed.

There were also a few new iPhone features I was hoping to see that are apparently not coming in July — features such as voice-activated dialing, MMS support, expanded Bluetooth options, and a better camera.

Regardless, there’s more than enough news and new stuff to sift through for now. I won’t be needing to look for things to keep me busy, while I wait for July 11 to arrive.

Today’s blog offers follow ups to three other recent blog entries and columns:

• In search of headphones for my iPhone. In May’s User Friendly View column, I detailed my search for a Bluetooth device to use with my iPhone when driving. I indicated that I would likely wind up getting a Bluetooth headset, such as the Aliph Jawbone or the Plantronics Discovery 925.

As it turns out, I went another route. I picked up a Virtual Reality Sound Labs’ Bluetooth Speaker Car Kit VRBT200V at Costco for just $40! Although the device has received mixed reviews at Amazon.com, I have found it to be a satisfactory solution.

The device clips onto a car’s visor and connects to an iPhone via Bluetooth. When a call comes in, you just press a button on the device and start talking. There’s nothing to stick in your ear and, if there is more than one person in the car, they can participate in the conversation. The LCD display serves as a caller-ID, showing you the incoming phone number. The unit also maintains a log of all recent incoming and outgoing phone numbers, from which you can later select to dial — eliminating the need to use the iPhone itself to call back a number. I confess that the logging feature did not always seem to save a phone number as expected but, when it worked, it worked great. The sound quality could have been better, but it was good enough for me to easily maintain a conversation. The device comes with a DC charger that connects to your car’s outlet.

Getting back to headsets:

Regarding my complaint about the poor fit of the Etymotic’s etyBLU headset, I made the surprising discovery that, when I shifted to the larger size plugs, the device fit better in my ear — even though the problem had appeared to be that the fit was already too snug. Go figure!

Regarding wired stereo headsets, I advise getting a set that has a relatively thick cord. Etymotic Research’s hf2, noted in my May column, is a good example of a thick cord headset. Eytmotic’s 6i Isolator Earphones, in contrast, have a much thinner cord. I have found that, with models that have a thin cord, it is almost impossible to keep the cord from becoming tangled while in its case. No matter what I do and no matter how carefully I store the cord (short of tying up the cord with a rubber band or whatever), there is apparently some gremlin inside the case that tangles everything all up so that I have to spend five minutes undoing the damage the next time I take the headset out!

• CableCARD Conspiracy? In my April blog entry, I complained that Sony televisions no longer include CableCARD slots, a turn of events that will force me to get a set-top box when I replace my existing Sony LCD model. It turns out that the problem isn’t limited to Sony. It appears that CableCARD slots has been dropped from all 2008 televisions. At least that’s what I was told at both Circuit City and Best Buy.

However, there is a glimmer of good news here. According to an SF Chronicle article, the set-top box may soon be extinct. The article reports that: “Sony Electronics Inc. and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association…{have}…signed an agreement that will allow viewers to rid themselves of set-top boxes yet still receive advanced two-way cable services, such as pay-per-view movies…Sony agreed to use the cable industry’s technology in its sets as soon as possible.”

I am guessing we will see these sets on shelves starting in 2009. I’ll be there to buy one!

• Apple’s unsupported support articles. Regarding my May blog entry, lamenting about how hard Apple makes it to locate recently added Knowledge Base articles: Check out the addendum I added to the entry three days after it was first posted. It notes that Apple has now addressed two of my main concerns: (1) modified dates are once again included with each KB article and (2) the special KB article that lists other recently modified articles is working again.

I don’t have much use for the iPhone’s autocorrection feature. If you feel the same way, here’s some good news: You can turn the feature off. It’s not as simple as you might hope. But it can be done. I’ll explain how in a moment. First, let’s start with why you might want to do it.

What’s the problem?

If the iPhone does not recognize a word you are currently typing, it offers a suggested alternative. Keep typing text and it will ignore its suggestion. If you instead press the space bar or a period, the iPhone automatically substitutes its suggested alternative for what you were typing. This, in essence, is autocorrection. It’s a minimalist spelling checker.

Autocorrection has its upsides. Particularly cool, for example, you can enter contracted words without needing to type the apostrophe. Type cant, for example, and the iPhone will offer can’t instead. Still, I rarely use autocorrection. More to the point, I too often find that it gets in my way, suggesting alternatives that are not at all what I intended to type.

The “tipping point” situation for me occurs when an alternative suggestion pops up at the last letter of a word. For example, suppose I truly intended to type cant (it is an actual word) instead of can’t. After typing the “t,” how do I tell the iPhone not to change the word to can’t? The only way, as far as I can tell, is to move my hand from the keyboard and tap on the word itself. Not only is this inconvenient, as it slows down my already slow typing — but, if I don’t notice the suggestion and continue typing (pressing the space bar), the unwanted word substitution is made. When I at last notice the error (which I hopefully will at some point), I have to go back and undo the damage, wasting even more time.

Given this, I decided to disable autocorrection. Oops. It turns out that the iPhone does not provide a setting for turning this feature on and off. So I did some searching, both on my own and on the Web. Eventually, I discovered a way to disable the feature. I found a second method described on the Web (although it required some minor updating for it to work with iPhone Software 1.1.4).

Before you get started

Before I detail how these solutions work, here are a few caveats:

• The solutions require that you jailbreak your iPhone (a procedure I have covered on several prior occasions, such as in this blog entry).

The solutions also require editing iPhone system software files. While there are several ways to do this, my preferred method is to use the AFPd utility, which you add via the Installer on a jailbroken iPhone (as I mention in this column and as covered in more detail at a UC Berekeley Web page). With this software installed, and the needed name and password entered, you can mount your iPhone on your Mac, as if it were a shared hard drive — and directly access its content.

Doing these things always has an element of risk. To be safe, make sure you have a backup of your iPhone’s files before making any changes. Even though the risk is small, you may be hesitant to take it at all. If so, you may still be intrigued to read on and discover what can be done with an iPhone if you push the envelope a bit.

• The solutions below require the use of Property List Editor (an Apple utility installed when you install the Developer software). For the sake of brevity, I don’t provide details on how to use this utility (or similar third-party alternatives such as PlistEdit Pro). If you need more help here, there are several places you can go, including my own series on the subject.

[By the way...if you have registered for access to Apple's iPhone Dev Center, and have downloaded the iPhone SDK, you may have discovered that the SDK includes a significantly updated version of Property List Editor. Among other additions and changes, it includes a View menu — with a suite of choices such as "Show Raw Keys/Values" vs. "Show Strings as Non-lossy ASCII."]

• iPhone 2.0 software is due to be released this month. With a little luck, this should mean that you will no longer have to jailbreak the iPhone to add the AFPd utility (as iPhone 2.0 permits the installation of third-party software). With a bit more luck, iPhone 2.0 may even build-in the option to turn off autocorrection, eliminating the need for this fix altogether. However, I have not seen any indication that this is the case; I expect the fix will still be needed. Finally, it is possible that iPhone 2.0 will include changes to the system software that make the instructions here invalid. Again, I doubt this will be the case, but it’s possible. I will certainly check into all of this after iPhone 2.0 is out.

Solution #1

This first solution is a bit simpler and less intrusive than the second option, but it offers less flexibility.

1. After using AFPd to mount your iPhone on your Mac, navigate to Mobile’s Home Dir > Library > Preferences.

2. From here, locate the com.apple.Preferences.plist file. Open it in Property List Editor.

3. Add a new property. Assign its name as KeyboardAutocorrection, with a class Boolean and a value No.

4. Save the modified file.

That’s it. You’ve now disabled autocorrection. It should take effect immediately; there is no need to restart. To reverse the change, simply go back to the plist file and change the value from No to Yes.

Solution #2

This solution adds an Enable Autocorrection option to your iPhone’s Settings, allowing you to turn the feature on and off without having to edit a plist file each time.

1. After using AFPd to mount your iPhone on your Mac, navigate to Root File System > Applications.

2. From here, locate an application called Preferences. Use the Show Package Contents contextual menu command to go “inside” the application.

3. Once there, locate a file named Keyboard.plist. Open it in a Property List Editor.

4. Add a new sub-property to the items property. There should already be 7 sub-properties there. Set up this new 8th one to have the settings as shown in the figure below.

5. Save the modified file.

Once again, that’s it. Now, go to Settings > General > Keyboard on your iPhone. You should find a new Enable Autocorrection option. Use it to disable or enable autocorrection.