Mistaken for Spam,

We spent from last Friday evening to the following Tuesday evening without internet access---so much for trying to post something new on the site every day. One reason we waited so long to complain was that the system was scheduled for an upgrade anyway---primarily, to cope with the ever-increasing amounts of spam I've been receiving. Granted, I was only getting 50 messages or so a day---but it was still awful.

Emacs (and xemacs), the program I used for email for many, many years, was and is wonderful, but written long before spam was a problem. So, I had to delete by hand. For awhile, I did this by flipping through the email, until the horrified wizard discovered this practice and informed me I was setting off traps that triggered more spam. He wanted me to use the summary. This made it more difficult to tell which letter I was on, and I promptly deleted two email, one from a guy I hadn't replied to yet and one from my uncle. I can ask my uncle to resend, but except in the unlikely case that the guy gets back to my website, I'll never hear from him again. I like hearing from people, and hate discouraging them.

But now I have a new program, Evolution, which seems to be pretty slick. Of course, I have to learn a slew of new commands to use it. Well, I was bummed when the firefox/mozilla people changed the keybindings from emacs to windows, too, but I coped. Sort of. [I still miss being able to delete from the url line with a simple [ctrl k, as well as the other two-stroke commands for moving around in xemacs docs, that used to work...]

At any rate, coping with spam should be easier, and as filtering it becomes more automated, I should be making fewer errors of this kind. If only the phone company would stop trashing our internet connection every time they come out to this neighborhood---this isn't the first time SBC was guilty of this, and it probably won't be the last---we'll be all set. The technical support from our ISP (which does not rely upon SBC to provide our access) had a rather telling reaction to my plaints: ``Well, officially, I can't comment about---'' (or some such) which is as far as he got before I burst out laughing.

C'est la vie.

Oh, and the how not to send email? Well, put something in the subject line that is germane to the content, like `I enjoyed your freezing fog pix' or `Q's about bead curtain construction'. If you have a return address that looks like sallysmith@provide.net or even mysticfirefairy@oogabooga.com I'm more likely to respond than if it's that hash I commonly get from spammers, such as jaadwzybjhtloh@onpro.ch.