Kangamail 28, another Canberra kangaroo kill proposed, 3/5/07

To all WPAA email lists. * Dealing with S.pam. * Yet another Canberra Kangaroo Kill Proposed.*

Dealing with Spam

Recently one of our Wildlife Bytes readers contacted us to say that their edition of Wildlife Bytes finished up in their sp.am box, where fortunately they could recover them. This reader uses Bigpond. It's very possible that if you are a WPAA member, or have subscribed to Wildlife Bytes or Kangamail, and you are not receiving them, some servers may have treated these ezines as S.pam. Why? Because we include newspaper articles and articles from other groups that we think our readers will be interested in. Unfortunately, these articles can contain words like k i, l l, or m o n, e y, that can trigger your servers S.pam filter, and you dont get the email.

Think about this! If you bought a kg of beans from your supermarket, and when you got home you only had 1/2 kg, you would be cross. Yet you pay good money to your email server to deliver your emails, and they wont deliver some because they don't like some words?

The whole stupidity of S.pam filters was highlighted last week, when a lady in NZ had all her emails deleted by Telecom (NZ version of Telstra, and no better) because she had signed them with her name G a y Whatshername. Telecom s.pam filters decided G a y was not an appropriate word to put in an email, and dumped them all!

So whats the point of Spa.m filters anyway. When the spam.mers just mispell their words like mon.ye, or se.xa.ul, you still get their rubbish anyway, and you can miss out on important emails. I wont use S.pam filters, and I've instructed my server to send me everything. I get 100 or so sp.am emails a day, and it only takes a couple of minutes to delete the lot of them. That way I make sure I get all my emails. And I get some pleasure from deleting S.pam. Some people may say I need to see a shrink because I enjoy that, but some people might say I need to see a shrink anyway.:o)

For people having trouble with serverside spa.m filters, I highly recommend Googles free webmail service Gmail. It's ten times better than any other f.re.e webmail service. Google claims you never need to delete emails because the mail box is huge. It has a s.pam box next to Inbox for easy access, and with my Gmail, which gets Wildlife Bytes sent to it, sometimes W/Bytes goes in there, but its easy to access and shift emails to wherever I like. It's a fantastic free service, and we are perfectly happy to change any of our subscriber's email addy to their Gmail addy. Just send us an email with your old addy, and your new Gmail addy.

Unfortunately Sp.am is a fact of life, Spa.m filters are generally useless, and governments are incapable of dealing with it. If you wish to get all your emails, you have to manage S.pam yourself. Like overdue income tax demands, fronting up to these difficult issues is always best.

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Another Kangaroo Kill Proposed

We have information that the Australian Defence Force intend to gain three licences to kill kangaroos at two sites in Canberra:

1. Belconnen Naval Transmission Station. This area is completely land locked by Suburbia. 2. Majura Training Area. Apparently this area has a lot of unexploded shells.

Apparently Defence staff claim starvation and damage to endangered lowland native temperate grasslands for both areas.

We sent the following email to the addys below. Please send something similar to those addresses, and any more Defence addys you can think of, Cheers, Pat

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Dear .......

We have information that the Australian Defence Force intend to gain three licences to kill kangaroos at two sites in Canberra:

1. Belconnen Naval Transmission Station. This area is completely land locked by Suburbia. 2. Majura Training Area. Apparently this area has a lot of unexploded shells.

Apparently Defence staff claim starvation and damage to endangered lowland native temperate grasslands for both areas.

It appears that the Australian Defence Force have forgotten about Pukapunyal and Googong Dam.

At Pukapunyal an attempt was made to kill thousands of kangaroos with the same excuse, the animals were starving. After protests and some really bad public relations media for the ADF, the real reason they wanted to kill the kangaroos was found...local graziers wanted the grass for their cattle that were agisted on Pukapunyal. It was a public relations disaster for the ADF.

At Googong Dam another attempt was made to kill kangaroos to the benefit of local graziers, and that was an even bigger public relations disaster, with media stories going all over the world. The thing that caught the attention of overseas media was that in Canberra, the Capitol of Australia, the Government were killing Australia's loved icon animal, the kangaroo.

Surely the ADF havent forgotten those incidents? If they have we are certainly going to remind them.

We urge you to instruct ADF staff to implement non-lethal solutions to alleged kangaroo problems, there are plenty of other solutions, killing wildlife should be the very last option, not the first.

Commander Defence Forces Angus Euston; angus.euston@defence.gov.au

Defence Secretary Nick Warner; nick.warner@defence.gov.au

Sincerely, Pat OBrien

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