Skrentablog

I came across a gripe that topix forums don't support plus signs in their email addrs in my daily topix vanity scan... John Reinke has come up with a way of forwarding gmail accounts to each other with disposable suffixes so that he can shut off a poisoned email target if it starts to get spam. Clever. I get way too much spam; my old personal addresses are essentially unusable at this point, having been around since about 1991, posted on usenet, the web, etc. I have been putting off doing something about this but figure I'll eventually come up with a solution. The problem is that I want to recover use of these old addresses, not just protect brand new ones (I usually use mailinator for throwaway registrations). So either I write some magical content or connection based spam detector (pita), upgrade to the latest & greatest off-the-shelf stuff, (have done before, pita to maintain), or do some kind of aggressive whitelist. Hmmm. Our new VP ops says he has a custom home-grown system he uses on his personal mail that he's going to deploy at topix. Maybe if that works well I'll see if I can use it on my private stuff too. Gosh, seems like we could have a whole new round of spam fighting startups. The last crop did well, but ... there's still spam, so clearly we're not done. :-)