All in the <head>

– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

– Live from The Internets since 2003 –

About

Delivery Failure

14 December 2003

I’m normally pretty good at mentally blanking out the spam subject lines as they come into MailWasher. I know that 99% of the email that I see will either be spam or bounces from spoofed spam and virus mails, as all the mail my filters can positively identify as expected is hidden from view. But for the last two weeks or so, one particular subject line has been catching my attention and sending me into a brief panic several times a day. ‘Delivery Failure’.

Of course, any mails with this subject line are either bounces from spoofed mail that used my address, or just some random spammer trying his luck. However, for the last two weeks I have equated this to:

Dear Customer. Thank you for your order. We attempted delivery on 12 December 2004, but unsuccessful due to . We will attempt to redeliver on 13 December 2006. Alternatively, you may arrange to collect the item from your nearest depot. The nearest depot is . Your business is important to us, however I do hope this parcel was not important to you as your chances of ever taking delivery are now so slim as to not really be worth consideration. Jim says thanks. He’d always wanted one of those.

And they say that Christmas shopping online is stress-free?

- Drew McLellan

Comments

Photographs

Work With Me

edgeofmyseat.com logo

At edgeofmyseat.com we build custom content management systems, ecommerce solutions and develop web apps.

Follow me

Recent Links

Affiliation

  • Web Standards Project
  • Britpack
  • 24 ways

I made

Perch - a really little cms

About Drew McLellan

Photo of Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan (@drewm) has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.