Spam Cannibal DNSBL spews false positives. Why Spam Cannibal Sucks.

If you are a system administrator thinking of adding Spam Cannibal's DNSBL to your arsenal, think again.  This list is the equivalent of using a chain saw to remove a small mole.  They block entire ranges of IP addresses. You will have to nurse this black list and constantly check for false positives.

Don't believe me. Read this thread from administrators discussing why spam cannibal sucks.

Then read this one.

And this one.

If you are on the receiving end of Spam Cannibal's bullshit, where important emails are lost just because someone you are not even associated with who is a few IP addresses away from you may have once sent a spam message, it just really sucks.

Spam Cannibal lies when they say, "The ONLY way you can get into SpamCannibal's database is by sending spam or virus ladened email to our mail servers!"

But then in their next sentence, they contradict this by saying that they block "IP addresses and ranges that have sent or relayed what we believe to be spam or other unsolicited email directly to our email servers."  So in fact, you don't have to send spam... you only have to have the misfortune of having been assigned an IP address near a spammer.

Spam Cannibal lacks the attention to detail that better lists have.  They really don't care who they hurt. They don't respect the importance of your user's communications.  They even don't provide a way to remove your IP address from this list, which is a huge failure of this DNSBL.  Clearly, they just don't give a rats ass.

If you value your time as a system administrator and your user's ability to receive email, then dump Spam Cannibal. Their approach is too random, too sporadic and unpredictable to be consistently useful. Sure Spam Cannibal keeps spam at bay, but so does just shutting off email.

There are better solutions than to use this DNSBL's careless nuclear approach to fighting email spam.

Online privacy and anonymity. Resources for an invasive world.

CNET Privacy Blog - keep up to date on current issues regarding online privacy

EFF.ORG -Organization that fights for privacy online

DuckDuckGo.com - internet search engine without tracking

www.dontrack.us  - information about how tracking works

www.dontbubble.us - how bubbling affects what you see on the internet

The filter bubble Ted Talk

Tor Project - free software to stay anonymous on the internet.

Free online email encryption

Reformatting a date column with a Time Stamp in Microsoft Excel

Today I've been working to clean up a database and it is has not been easy. I downloaded several spreadsheets of customer data from SWReg.  They have a nasty habit of putting Time information in the middle of the date field.

It looks like this: Feb 17 16:40:19 2011

My challenge was to create a column that formatted the date correctly, without the time stamp. Here's the solution I came up with.

To format the date from cell B2, it column C2 I entered:

=(LEFT(B2,7)&" "&(RIGHT(B2,4))

This pulled out the date from the left (I had a space in front of the date, so that's why I set it to read the first 7 characters of cell B2) and the year from the right (4 characters on the right).

Maybe there's a better way to do it. I really wish Microsoft would make it easier to clean your data in Excel.

Maybe you can help me out... One thing I was really struggling with:  How to use Find and Replace within a specified column only. I couldn't figure that out.

Good luck!