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Following on from my adventures in dealing with spam messages, it’s quite strange that Mail.app doesn’t have an option to always show the from address domain in the mailbox list. It took opening the message, plus an additional click to confirm whether a “spam summary” email I received this morning was a phishing attempt (it was). I rather not open those mail messages at all1, if I can help it, and seeing the domain — which should be enough, given that it’s usually some junk domain like “funnybone dot com” — could allow me to dispose of these messages using the context menu.
Everyone knows that email is no longer a trust-by-default communication medium, so it strikes me as odd that these basic facilities are not available in MacOS’s default mail client. Seems like it’s barely change at all in recent years. Oh no, that’s not true: it now gives AI mail summaries that are totally useless. A feature like this would be much easier to add, and be much more useful to me.
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This is mainly because Mail.app also doesn’t have an option to avoid loading images across the board, or unless it’s a trusted domain. It does this automatically if the message end up in the Junk folder, but given that these phishing attempts made it into the Inbox, my trust in this feature is pretty low. ↩︎
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I’ve started seeing phishing emails that try to simulate those email spam summaries you occasionally get from centralised spam-traps. I don’t usually get these sorts of messages so my suspicions where heightened when I saw these emails this morning, and after checking the domain — which takes too many clicks to do, Apple! — my suspicions were confirmed.
And it got me thinking: why didn’t Apple’s Mail summary indicated that these messages were spam? Not that I have any expectation for Apple’s AI do so, but the conspiratorial part of me started wondering whether it actually did, and report it as such in the summary. Here’s how the message looks in the Inbox list:
Could it be “spam report,” as in “this is a report on spam;” or “spam report,” as in “this is spam, and is made to look like a report?” I’ve not seen phishing attempts that try to look like these sorts of mail messages before, and I’m wondering if spammers and phishers are now trying to tailor their messages to try and fool the AI into producing an ambiguous dscription where the AI is trying to report the message as spam, yet the reader interpertes it to mean that the message is about spam.
Again, this is probably just conspiratorial thinking on my part, and I’ve just been one of the lucky ones to have not seen these phishing messages before.
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Attending the DDD Melbourne 2025 Conference
Yesterday, I attended the DDD Melbourne 2025 conference. This was in service of my yearly goal to get out more, to be around people more often than I have been. So the whole reason I attended was to meet new people. That didn’t happen: I said hi to a few people I once worked with, and spoke to a few sponsors, but that was it. So although I marked it off my goal list, it wasn’t a huge success. Continue reading →
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Saw a couple of spotters at the gym this morning: two brush tail possums. Mother and baby I’m guessing.
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“Get out more” goal for February achieved. ✅
Attended the DDD Melbourne 2025 conference. Technically I’m still attending it, as it’s not over yet, but it’s close enough to finished that I’m calling it now.
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I think I tend to overthink things too much, if last night is any indication. It’s probably good, to some degree, to consider all outcomes of doing something, for no other reason than to satisfy a need for certainty when events go a certain way. But it might be that one could spend too long doing so, and miss any opportunities that come from it. It’s always harder to see things go right than it is to see things go wrong, or at least that’s how I seem to be wired.
I’ve seen this in my job too, where I feel (and it’s only a feeling) that my designs are more complicated then they need to be for similar reasons. Might not be related thought; just a passing thought while I go through this reflection.
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Free motivational slogan for anyone wanting to start a line of sports-related T-shirts:
This SHIRT, that HURT, could’ve hit the DIRT.
Emphasis intentional.
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Someone at work showed them to me and let me try out their noise cancelling. It’s good. The best I’ve head so far. All the background noise completely vanished. Will need to check these out.
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🔗 Letters from an American: February 1, 2025
Hmm, not entirely sure what’s going on over there in the US, but it doesn’t sound good.
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🔗 The Gentrification of Video Game History
An interesting discussion on the slow erosion of local history around gaming in the face of a US-centric telling of history.
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I enjoyed Cory Doctorow five year anniversary post on Pluralistic. Even better was falling down the rabbit hole of reading his other anniversary posts, then branching out to his other posts such as his one on blogging itself.
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Debugging Edge Lambdas is such a pain due to how long it takes to deploy them to test something. Not helping is that different layers have standardised on names that use
URLwhile others useUrl. I wonder if it’s better to just pick one case for the names I’m using, even if stands out from the other names following the particular “standard”. -
Oh crap, I’ve gotta watch myself! I just configured a parameter in prod thinking that I was doing it in dev. Should’ve seen the warning signs when I got a permission error and had to boost to the next level. The change should be benign, but I need to be a little more careful.
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I’ve been kind of anxious about tomorrow these past few days. I’m going to a single day developer conference alone, with no-one else I know or work with. This means I’ll be interacting with people I don’t know. That is the point of this — this activity is Feb’s “get out more” goal — but I’ve been partly wondering whether I’ve bitten off more than I can chew here.
But reflecting on it just now, it may not be as bad as I think. Most of the day will be the actual sessions. It’s the breaks that I’m anxious about, but I can probably deal with them. It wouldn’t be the first social gathering in a industry setting I go to where I didn’t know anybody. I was going to say it was, until I started writing this post, and recalled past instances where I’ve been in the same boat, and although I wouldn’t say it was easy, I lived to tell the tale. I may be able to step outside for a little while and go for a walk if I absolutely need to.
So it should be fine. I’ll give myself an out at lunchtime if necessary but I’ll try to stay the whole day.
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Another Twitter embed bites the dust:
That’s all of them now. I can’t see any more uses of that short-code here. Guess I was right not to do that too often.
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Have technically secured user no. 2 of UCL today, after sharing one of the tools that’s using the language with them at work. It’s just a shame that the docs are so far behind (read: not existent). All I really have are these blog posts about building it. Good thing he’s a reader 😛. (Hi, KK).
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Things I’ve said out loud today:
What am I going to do about Norway?
I’ve got a plan but I’ve yet to rollout a fix yet. 😛🇳🇴
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Making A Small Two-Letter Country Code Lookup Page
A small evening project where I made a simple site designed for Vivalidi’s sidebar to quickly lookup two-letter country codes defined in ISO-3166-1 alpha 2. Continue reading →
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“Well we can’t run the trams on time, but with our new PTV app, we can tell you just how late they are.”
“What an age we live in.”
😛
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I know for myself that if I were to choose one blogging CRM over another because “that’s how I get the traffic,” I’d probably stop blogging. It’d be clear to me that my priorities are warped, that I’m writing purely to chase the views. I can’t see that road leading to anything other than burnout.
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I’m noticing how unproductive I am when I’m babysitting long running processes. Every time I try to start some focus work, I immediately switch back to monitoring the output with the expectation of dealing with errors or refreshing timed-out auth tokens.
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An Incomplete List of DRM-Free Media Stores
A collection of links to online stores that sell DRM-Free media. Continue reading →
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Bad keyboard! Naughty keyboard! Causing all these spelling errors in your user’s last two posts. 😜
