Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 July 29

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July 29

Spam blocking in Evolution

Lately I've been receiving the exact same kind of spam every day. There's a fake job offering saying I could do off-shore work at a "large American company" dealing with the banking business. In reality, what would happen if I were to apply for the job, I would be repeatedly requested to pay some minor tax or form handling fees, all of which would go to some Nigerian criminal's pockets, with me never seeing anything of the actual job. How do I block these e-mails in Evolution on Fedora 14 Linux? The problem is that both the sender and the subject always vary, and the alleged sender is even in the same domain as my own e-mail. I certainly don't want to block everyone in my own domain. The actual text of the e-mail is usually nearly perfectly identical, with pretty much only the username of the alleged "contact person" (in reality one and the same Nigerian criminal) varying. But as I have come to understand, Evolution does not support automatically blocking e-mails based on their content, only on the headers. JIP | Talk 20:03, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Blocking spam nowadays requires a high level of sophistication, and I wouldn't advise trying to do it locally. There are things you can do, but you'll end up spending more time trying to figure out how to block the spam than you would looking at it. The best solution is to get an email account with a provider that handles spam for you. I use gmail, with quite satisfactory results so far. I do get the occasional bit of spam, but not enough to worry me. Looie496 (talk) 22:49, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Alternately, free software implementations do exist, such as SpamAssassin, that can be run on the IMAP server, on the SMTP server, and/or as preprocessor on the client side. If you do want to run such a tool yourself, you'll need to get your hands dirty with the way that email works; and I'm not sure the free software/freely-available-configurations are as good as the commercial services. Just to be clear: it is possible to run SpamAssassin and similar software even if you don't run your own email server. However, this is a “less common” configuration. Nimur (talk) 00:45, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

I haven't used Evolution in a while, but I'm pretty sure you can at least set it up to automatically move things to a folder based on keywords and other criteria. You may even be able to tell it to move it right to trash. It isn't as nice as blocking it completely but it will at least get it out of your inbox. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 18:10, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

OK, it appears that Evolution has an option to filter on "Message body". I've set it to automatically move any message containing both "Large American company" and "top10jobbs" to the Junk mail folder. Let's see if it works. JIP | Talk 20:27, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Learning Java

What are the best books for learning Java? In case it helps, I am not unfamiliar with programming but I am by no means experienced. Thanks. 92.6.159.241 (talk) 23:00, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't know about the best, but I will say that there are many large textbooks on Java which may be of use. I have looked at Deitel's How to Program Java and found it pretty straightforward for people at all levels — there is a lot of very basic stuff there (what is a computer? what is a monitor?) that you can skip if that's too easy, but it ramps up quickly. I found it a fine way to get a sense of the language (as someone who has done a lot of scripting previously, but not a lot of hard-core programming), but I am not a Java developer by any means. --Mr.98 (talk) 23:26, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, Java's got one of the better web resource sets out there in terms of tutorials, APIs and example code. As for your question, I have certainly read some bad Java programming books. For my money, out of the six or so books I've cracked on the subject, Daniel Liang's "Introduction to Java Programming" (whatever the latest edition is now) is the best one. I still use it as a reference for times when I know what I want to do, but I've forgotten the Java version of how to do it. It covers a wide range of topics, all from an introductory level, so you can get your feet wet with whatever task you need to accomplish.

Looking forward, you'll find that the advanced topics tend to be language-independent. Steve McConnell's "Code Complete" 2nd ed. is probably the best book out there for turning initiates into journeymen, and anyone who is in the position of needing to program on a regular basis ought to read it at least once. Beyond that, once your basics are sound, design patterns and refactoring are two key areas for further enhancing your skill set. BigNate37_(T) 00:12, 30 July 2012 (UTC)