"You've Got Mail" is (Again) Music to My Ears

Recently the Scum of the Earth,aka Spammers, required me to put an old aquaintance out of it's misery. My email address of nearly ten years. [Insert maudlin violin music here]

I was so naive in the 90's. I published my email addresses helter-skelter across the digital landscape. I wanted people to be able to contact me easily. Every web page, newsgroup and chat room had my ID on display. You're probably familiar with what happened next. At first just a handful of annoying spam messages arrived in my inbox. Then a few more, and more and more. Finally the task that was once fun turned into a chore, and then an impossible job.

I turned to a software package from McAfee, SpamKiller, to help me maintain control for awhile. It allowed me to keep on top of the nightmare of 200+ messages a day. It allowed me to put off the decision for nearly two years.

BTW: This is not an endorsement of SpamKiller. It's a lousy program. It's poorly designed and even more poorly implemented. It's inexcusably slow and has a lot of quirks that are simply unacceptable in a supposedly professionally produced package. If you're going to try and control the spam with software on your local machine look elsewhere.

In desperation I returned to an old Yahoo free email account. I reviewed some of the newer features available to paid users of the Yahoo service. I was surprised how far the service had come in the past few years. With the POP3 support I can continue to use my email client rather than the web interface. If you do leave your mail their servers you can now select any set of messages and ZIP them into an archive file and downloaded. Unfortunately this archiving feature is required due to the very limited disk space Yahoo provides; 25Mb. This might have been fine a few years ago, but with Google Mail offering 1Gb of storage this is stingy.
[Update: 15 June 2004. Today Yahoo updated it's free service to support 100Mb of storage and the Mail Plus account to 2Gb. Now I don't need to delete anything!]

To me the best feature was the introduction of disposable email addresses. You choose a fixed basename and then add an extension to create a valid email address. You can then use this address anywhere. If you start receiving too much spam at a particular address you delete it and create another. If you use a different address for different vendors and groups you can determine where, or who, is distributing your address.

Hesitantly I forked over the $20 a year and upgraded to the Yahoo Mail Plus account. After a month of use I understand why Yahoo Mail is popular. Being able to read and send message from any web enabled site is liberating. I worry less about backups and have decided I don't need the POP3 access. So far the spam filtering works well, seeming better than the free service.

It's working so well in fact I feel safe enough to again let people contact me. So feel free to drop me a line at dramplace-wazzup@yahoo.com.

It's good to be back!