Have you ever wondered how spammers got hold of your email address?

Well, if you are using Gmail, there is one little feature in Gmail that can help you find out and even manage the spams. I found out about this only a few months ago and have yet to try it out.

You see, some dodgy websites that requires you to provide your email address can sometimes also sell away your email address to spammers (they could actually also be the spammers themselves). With this google feature, you can leave a ‘marker’. For example, if you want to register on my website (www.adriantai.com) and your email address is gmail@gmail.com, you can actually sign up as gmail+adriantaidotcom@gmail.com. Emails that comes from my site will still arrive at your mailbox because Gmail will not recognise anything after the ‘+’ sign.

You can then create a filter to filter out emails sent to mygmail+adriantaidotcom@gmail.com. This way, when you start getting emails that is not sent out by www.adriantai.com, you know something is not right and your ‘email address’ is probably in a spam list now… That’s when you change the filter to direct emails straight to the trash!

But don’t worry… www.adriantai.com don’t do such things…

For more details about this, do check out the Gmail blog. Let me know if you need a step-by-step guide. I’ll be more than happy to write one.

Today is my first day back at work after a month long break. Once again, I have to really say that I’m very fortunate and grateful that my present employer allowed me to take the month off since I’ve only joined them in May itself!

My boss is in town so I managed to personally thank him for the arrangement and approval. I believe the one month break was something very important as it helped Mrs Tai and myself get through the difficult and painful time. Without the break, I really don’t know what would have happened. As it is, both of us are doing fine now. Mrs Tai is now back at her parent’s place as she is still on maternity leave.

Things in the office is fine. I guess everyone’s heard about it. One month away, so as expected, there’s lots of stuffs to follow-up and complete. There is a long to-do list and I definitely want to catch up and complete them all ASAP.

Things don’t stop after office hours. It seems the upgrade of the Setia Alam Residents’ Association (SARA) forum didn’t go as smoothly as planned and I ended up spending about two hours working on it. Luckily the members were very understanding and looked on the bright side (new version means better features) instead of demanding for my head on the floor…