About ten years ago, when email was new and fine, I wanted an address that would make slightly less boring the business of reading it out down a phone (“at, that’s the funny little sign that looks like …”). Since one of the things you always had to say in these conversations was “all one word”, a moment of bored inspiration at the Independent one afternoon supplied me with the perfect address for witless computer industry PRs. alloneword@dial.pipex.com I became. the joke gave me small flutters of amusement for years. It’s over now.
For years I have only used the address for mailing lists. That makes spam filtering easier. If it’s not from one of a short, defined list of mass mailers, it goes inot the spam bin. But it’s not infallible. Some real people write to me at that address, so I do have to scan it, and the sheer weight of spam has got absurd. Mail to these domains, which I own, goes through spamassassin, and I never see most of it at all. But the alloneword address was picking up 100 messages everyday, and it’s not funy any more. So I vaped it this morning, and replaced it with a new, mailing-list-only address, “ingenstans”, which is the Swedish for “nowhere”. It’s the only place left where email works as it should.
So what address should I use now?
Simon (not a mailing list)
That put me in mind of Erewhon’s Book of the Machines…
“Who shall deny that one who can tack on a special train to his identity, and go wheresoever he will whensoever he pleases, is more highly organized than he who, should he wish for the same power, might wish for the wings of a bird with an equal chance of getting them; and whose legs are his only means of locomotion?”
(I can’t read Erewhon these days without yelping with delight every other sentence – I nearly posted a slew of quotes about machine intelligence and stuff like “The writer went on to say that he anticipated a time when it would be possible, by examining a single hair with a powerful microscope, to know whether its owner could be insulted with impunity.”, but even these days it’s out of copyright and into Googleright).
R
Dear blog owner,
I have started a new project called BlogSpam.ORG, the reason, the increment of spam in blog enviroments.
http://www.blogspam.org
I have collected methods to fight this plague and articles of general topics about spam.
I want to know your opinion, you are invited to participate in my blog.
If you want to send me some stuff about spam I