Unless i am mistaken you can recover vat on any type of van because they are classed as commercial vehicles but you are still required to have your business registered with Customs and Excise

There is no real difference in the source of the messages you're talking about, only the purpose of them. Actually I've worked as a freelancer for a few legit web search companies researching natural language processing techniques to get sites noticed by search engines while excluding the pron sites. The pron sites are of course trying to get themselves noticed, so this is a continuous battle requiring very clever and expensive work on NLP (note I'm an editor, not a linguist: I just apply their work for whichever side is paying).

But part of what I did (this was a couple of years ago now) was work on the human interface part of spam: how do you word messages so that people will be more likely to respond to spam emails (thus proving the address is live)? Of course this has to be constantly revised to take account of new slang terms, popular idioms, world events and so on. Automated natural language processing systems are not yet anywhere near as good at this as humans are. In fact some spam is actually used in researching/testing this stuff as a secondary function: they are learning all the time and it's a massive business. The big pron companies in particular spend millions on language research and are involved in many other internet businesses, including the vi@gr@ and "waste management" systems.

>It just seems that when one spammer has your address others soon follow.

This is exactly my point: once an address is known to be live it will get sold on and is worth much more than a randomly generated one. This is why you should never reply. The randomly generated ones also have value to the spammers in that they get quite a lot of hits anyway (about 7% I believe, which seems quite a lot), but it's a crude method and often used by small-scale chancers: having real live addresses is much more effective. I believe bouncing works (it does for me anyway) because after a while the companies that compile and sell lists remove that address (it costs them bandwidth to receive bounced messages after all). It does take time.

As I say I'm now down to one or two spam emails a week as opposed to forty a day at one time: it goes in waves, usually rising when the latest Windows Worm makes an appearance and another batch of Outlook address books hits the databases. Most of the mail clients are adopting a bounce button so it can't be all hokum, but I accept it's only one weapon.

For the record, in the words of a song: "If I'm not pure at least my jewels are."

Chris

elekie&a/c doctor you're a star!
I found the multiplug connector just above the clutch thanks to your tip, the two halves had come loose and pushing them together firmly solved the problem, and also got various dashboard lights working e.g. glow plug light and heater control lights.
Many thanks!

Just checked the Mobil website. Mobil 1 meets or exceeds ACEA A3, B3 and B4 and is approved by some fairly weighty manufacturers on this basis.

B4 is the diesel specification for extended oil changes, the kind managed by in-car diagnostics (BMW, Merc) and has to be able to maintain lubricity and detergent values for upwards of 20,000 miles.

To also be rated as A3 indicates that this is perfectly acceptable for modern petrol engines also.

Kwikfit use Mobile Super S or Mobil 1 on their oil changes and they are both confirmed suitable for diesel and petrol cars. I would be reluctant to use a B4 spec oil in an older petrol engine, but then I wouldn\'t want to waste my money on fully synth in an older petrol engine, so not really an issue.

I tried the nuisance call bureau when we were getting about

100 calls a week, at all hours, intended for Epsom Hospital.