The more I use Ebay lately, the more I realise it has become the Pasha Bulker of web applications. It is a bulk freighter, burdened by its own cumbersome mass, unable to quickly change direction to avoid trouble before running aground.

I had a laptop listed on Ebay for the past ten days. During most of that period, a legitimate looking Aussie buyer held the winning big. Yesterday, the final day, I received a dodgy message asking “Hi, will you send to Indonesia?”. I immediately suspected it was a dodgy scam, not really standing out among the other 20 or so fraudulent messages I’d received during the 10 day listing duration. So I ignored the message.

However, within the final 30 seconds of the auction, this same dodgy Indonesian Ebay member outbid the Aussie bidder by about $200. I suspected something dodgy, but anyway awaited payment. This morning, I received the following crap from Ebay:

The results of the following listings have been cancelled due to bidding activity that took place without the account owner’s authorisation:

We have temporarily suspended the bidding account and we are working with the account owner to prevent any further unauthorised activity. Since the account owner did not initiate these bids, fees resulting from the listings in question have been credited to your account.

Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to automatically relist these items for you. Instead, to relist these items you will need to start from the beginning of the listing process, either through the “Sell Your Item” process or through your third party listing service. We know that this is an inconvenience and we apologise for the negative impact it may cause you. We are working on tools to allow you to relist your items without starting from the beginning, but they are not available at this time.

Please do not respond to this email, as your reply will not be received. If there are issues that have not been addressed by this message, you can contact us by clicking the “Help” link located at the top of most eBay pages and selecting “Contact Us” from the menu on the left hand of the page.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Regards,

eBay Trust & Safety

I am definitely appreciative of the fact that they realised this guy was fraudulent. However, the problem being that they had now completely wiped all record of my listing. So it was no longer in My Ebay whatsoever - 100% totally lost. I couldn’t offer the legitimate Aussie bidder a “second chance offer” and I lost all the detailed specification text that I’d spent ages in putting together so that the ad was informative and useful to prospective buyers. Ugh!

So the lesson learnt would be always keep your own offline backups of any long and detailed text that you save into an Ebay auction, just incase they lose the lot and you can’t get it back. Additionally, when you’re selling expensive electronic/technology items, block overseas buyers. Chances are they would be able to get the same machine cheaper than from in Australia anyway.

Although I am starting to hate the Ebay product, I just can’t think of any other prominent web site with the potential to sell the laptop for a strong price. Frustrated and confused, I had no choice but to spend the time re-listing on Ebay, however with a few key changes to the listing. This meant trimming and preparing the photos in Photoshop again and cutting and pasting lots of specification text back into a fresh listing. Total time wasted approximately 1 hour. This time, the item won’t be available to overseas buyers and I have trimmed down the accepted payment methods.

With any luck, it might sell for a higher price this time as compensation for the ordeal.

WARNING to bloggers: Do not waste your time typing any really long messages into wordpress unless you have uploaded a .htaccess file containing the following into your wp-admin folder:

SecFilterScanPOST Off

If you don’t do this, a built-in linux thing called MOD_SECURITY may highly likely think that your post is a malicious hacking attempt and it will block the form submission and send you to an ugly wordpress 404 page. I have been stung by this one many times and it just stung me again, while actually writing another blog post which I just completely lost because of this bug. It wipes out the contents of your form when you use the Back button and its extremely frustrating.

Wordpress should have done the right thing and included this .htaccess file with the product archive so that it exists by default without their users having to learn the hard way.

I’ve been using Thunderbird as my email client for about 6 months now. Its been gradually driving me more and more crazy until I’ve finally reached the point where it is not worth the pain and I am going to uninstall and use something else. My new XPS M1210 will be arriving soon with all the Office 2007 Pro caper, so I am prepared to give the new Outlook 2007 a chance.

What annoys me about Thunderbird:

1. There is some kind of critical bug that completely wipes all of my account settings approximately once per month. On some lucky day of every month I will attempt to load up Thunderbird and it will tell me to Add a New Email Account via its New Account Wizard. I currently have 3 separate POP3 accounts, each have their own physical mail locations, mail folders and own custom settings - yep all gone. From reading into this problem, I have learned that you can manually re-add all of the lost accounts and then re-point Thunderbird to the old file locations which still exist on your hard drive, then change all of your settings back. This gets your old data back, although it takes me approximately 15 minutes of complete piss farting around and inspires me to write a blog post about it (It just happened again this morning). Normally I just say “Oh there is no better mail client out there, I’ll just manually re-add all the settings and accounts back in and be done with it”. But not this morning, no this is ridiculous guys.
2. The default settings that the application comes with are very left-wing alternative hardcore and annoying to most users. By default, for each of your separate email accounts, it comes with a setting that starts your reply text off at the bottom of the email thread. So when you send the message, the recipient can’t see your reply until they scroll to the bottom. I understand this is the way that a lot of hardcore unix haX0rs prefer to operate from some old newsgroup days or whatever, but in the modern world where so many things have become adopted standards for business tools, its just totally opposed to what 99% of users prefer. Just bite the bullet and swallow your hardcore pride and make the default setting “Start my reply Above”.
3. When you COPY a file and PASTE it into an email, Thunderbird pastes in some useless text link, rather than physically attaching the file itself like Outlook does. This is just annoying and useless. Each time I realise I have done the same thing, I have to delete the messy link it placed in there and manually go through the menu to find the Attach option and then use the Browse button. I’m sure there is some cool shortcut for doing this, but the thing with intuitive applications is that it shouldn’t be a mystery to work out how to use common features. You shouldn’t need to study up or search on the web to find a nice way of doing something, it should be obvious and standard.
4. It comes with a default setting to play a loud BEEP when an email arrives. Now, each time it loses my settings, this beep setting is restored. I normally have my laptop hooked up to speakers playing music. So I am always really happy to be deafened by Thunderbird’s annoying beep blaring over the top of the music, scaring the hell out of me, just because an email arrived and its settings were wiped by its own bugs.
5. I’m really appreciative of the Thunderbird start page which just visually bloats up my inbox, but its just another thing that you need to turn off to customise Thunderbird to be nice to use.
6. When you accidentally open up the wrong message, pressing escape does absolutely nothing. Its such a standard for that to prompt to close the window.
7. Messages are forwarded by default as attachments, not inline. Just another setting to manually change before the program is usable. Otherwise, you get a lot of bounce backs for forwarding .eml messages as this gets flagged as spam.

I definitely think that Thunderbird is a very clean, efficient email client that has a LOT of potential. The things that annoy me really are pretty easily fixed. It needs another month or so of refinement in their development labs and a new version pushed out. If they can fix all of these things, then I would come back in a flash. But right now, its just taking up way too much of my time, simply to read my email!

I have just noticed the Pageranks of a few sites change today - for the better!

Recently, I acquired a grunty new dedicated web server, located in Sydney as a platform for the new web business in anticipation of some prime time TV coverage on Today Tonight. The side benefit of getting a powerful machine was being able to close down a few scattered web hosting accounts and move everything onto the dedicated server, including this web site.

After copying this web site across to the new server, the only thing I had to do to complete the migration was update aaconsult’s DNS settings. Completely by accident, I was issued with some terribly incorrect DNS settings. The result was that aaconsult.com.au and another couple of my sites went down for approximately 3 days - long enough to give people the message that they perhaps don’t exist any more. Of course, all of my email accounts rely on these domains being active - so my email was completely down for the period also. In fact, my email addresses no longer even existed during this period. All of my regular contacts were receiving bounce back undeliverable messages from their mail servers. So too, obviously, were the spammers. And spam was becoming a real problem for me. I was on average receiving approximately 50 image spam messages per day in one of the accounts - a lot of them seemingly from the same author/origin. Each of these images anywhere between 20 and 40k, enough to clog up my broadband connection momentarily and sap from my quota. I was not far off setting up something like Mailwasher to deal with it at the source.

Now put yourself in the mind of the spammer. Sending hundreds of thousands of messages out each day, its critical that you don’t waste time and bandwidth by sending half of those to non-existent addresses. To be most effective, you can guarantee that you would process every bounce back message received and remove those recipients from your list. I was a perfect candidate for this seeing that I’d been unreachable for 3 days.

Now about two weeks after the outage, I am literally getting about one spam email per day and some days - zero. My inbox hasn’t been this clean for a couple of years.

What turned out exceptionally convenient for me, I’m not saying its a solution for you. Obviously if your site is extremely busy, there is no way you can afford 3 days downtime. But there might be other ways of using this to your advantage.

To cleanse your spamified user@host.com email account, what about:

1. Set up a temporary address using a separate domain. E.g. temp@host2.com.
2. Issue the temporary address to your regular contacts, friends and colleagues so that they can keep in touch with you.
3. Update any web site code that sends emails to user@host.com to now send to temp@host2.com.
4. Go in and manually butcher your DNS settings to deliberately bring your domain down like a ton of bricks.
5. Come back 3 days later and fix up the DNS settings.
6. Go back to using your old original beloved email address, which is hopefully not the target of so much spam any more.

Note: No responsibility is taken for any lost Google Pageranks, search engine rankings or revenue!