Normalkid:Arnold Kim

VersionTracker and MacFixIt have been acquired by CNET.

I’m really excited about this. It gives VersionTracker—and our sister sites, iPhone Atlas and MacFixIt—more resources to grow and gives us higher visibility than I could have ever imagined for our humble site. It also gives CNET a stronger presence in the Mac market than ever before. I think that says a lot about what we’ve been able to create here at TechTracker.

Interesting. Perhaps the biggest Mac-site acquisition ever.

I got a lot of spam.

I know some of you are saying “sure, we all get a lot of spam”. But for me, a combination of running various websites over the years, and not wanting to throw away my email addresses has resulted in me being a particularly high spam recipient. So much so, that it had become a full time job just trying to clear out my spam folder.

I’ve tried Apple’s Mail, Gmail and a couple of other 3rd party applications to help filter my spam. The problem with all of these solutions has been that of False Positives. False Positives being legitimate emails that get tagged as spam and buried in my Spam folder. Running various websites, I might frequently get sales/advertising inquiries which could easily trigger normal Spam filters.

So based on a recommendation I read in another blog, I signed up for SpamStopsHere.com. (No referral link, this is not an ad. I’m simply a happy customer.) Note, it’s only available to users who host their own domain and costs $10-$19/mo to start for basic service.

Again, my priority was to avoid false positives, so their filtering system appealed to me. They filter based on known urls, phone numbers and phrases, allowing you to simply reject those emails with a pretty high confidence that you are not bouncing any legitimate emails. They have additional filters of varying criteria which you can tweak to your satisfaction.

Here’s my stats from this month to date. Note, a high number of legitimate emails are automated notifications, so the real number of actual emails I have to read is much smaller:

That’s over 6500 spam emails a day that get rejected automatically and I’m confident those rejects are really spam.

I still get some spam as well, but a far more manageable amount that I just delete as I go through my email. I’m also pretty confident that legitimate emails are not getting blocked. I don’t use spam filters anymore on my home computer.

I was wrong. Or, I guess, my conclusion was wrong in Final Verdict: Keyboard Fake. iPod UI Real.

The prototype keyboard photos that were posted to Chinese forum were real.

It really is a significant event that will make the rumor-mill a bit more exciting. For the first time, Apple has let photos of a pre-release product be widely distributed, and not take any efforts to suppress their distribution. Good or bad, this is going to make future “spy shots” harder to assess.

Whether or not the iPod UI will be a shipping product remains to be seen, but I think we’ll see the iPod UI shortly.

Gizmodo posted and then retracted a rumor that they posted from someone who emailed them and purported to be from a Google Product Marketing Manager.

Engadget goes on to “debunk” this rumor, making a big deal about it.

Gizmodo even goes so far as to say that this is the reason why you should “Never ever trust rumors.” I’ll counter and say, this is why you should never ever trust rumors from sites that don’t regularly deal in Apple rumors. Now I think Gizmodo and Engadget do a great job in general, but they’ve never been a reliable source of original Apple rumors.

It’s no shock to me that someone submitted fake rumors to a popular gadget site. Submitting fake Apple rumors has been a long time sport. MacRumors gets fake submissions on a daily basis. If we posted every submission that sounded at all plausible, we would lose a lot of respect from our regulars.