WHEW! It's been a while, but I have been busy. One, trying to learn C#, two just a plethora of other projects, and three, moving my other blogs. I had been using hosted blogs, for which I was paying monthly fees. This got a little old, so I moved them to my own site (http://www.ezekius.com, which is not finished yet, by the way), but they are built using the Blogger service, making them free. They are (of course) very spiritual in nature, so please drop by when you get the chance. Hopefully, you'll find something that will help you. If so, I'd of course appreciate your spreading the word. The addresses are:

http://firebones.ezekius.com (The Fire in my Bones)

http://biblefire.ezekius.com (BibleFire!)

Http://preacherblog.blogspot.com (This one is hosted directly on Blogger)

Anyway, more commentary on the technology mess:

There's a new service that seems intent on making life difficult for spammers. Blue Security is the company, and their system basically lets users sign up with up to 3 email accounts (probably a limit of the beta of the service). They then create a number of dummy accounts for you, and when messages come in, they are screened and any that are found to be spam are not only blocked, but the senders are traced and notified that they are sending their mess to someone who does not want to receive it. Long story short, if the spammer doesn't cease, then Blue Security will bombard the spammer's site with unsubscribe requests, apparently not just from your computer, but from the computers of all others using the service. This not only causes the spamers to have to deal with potentially thousands of unsubscribe requests, but it also eats away at their bandwidth, potentially costing them money, and possibly causing their servers to become inoperable.

I personally think it's a great idea, but there might well be legal implications, because the method bears a strong resemblance to a DoS attack. Sad as it is, we do have to protect the rights of these snakes in order to keep us all relatively free. Just in case, I'm going to go ahead and sign up now while it's in beta; maybe that will give me a break of some kind when the beta ends.

...be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

By the way, the next best thing, I think, is an email whitelist deal, such as that offered by a product called ChoiceMail. When you get mail from any sender not on your whitelist, a message is sent back to have the sender apply for permission to send you mail. If they don't apply (or if you don't approve) all future mail is automatically deleted without delivery. The problem with this is that some legitimate senders might have spam filters that will block the message ChoiceMail send to them to ask them to apply for permission. So, I guess we keep searching for that elusive, near-perfect solution.