Hi, We're from Hotmail, and we're here to not fight spam in the slightest. How's your Junk Folder d

[digitaldiscipline]

We get an average of one porn/herbal supplement/cheap toner spam an hour at the office's old Hotmail addy. And various not-too-savvy clients get confused when I say, "Please use our new email address blah@blah.blah, as this account has become nothing but a spam-magnet."

Apparently, there was a recall on defective clues this week, too - however, the owners were left to function in the wide world while their brains were RMA'd. Our corporate site has been up since November, and until this past Monday, I'd recieved all of one phone call saying, "I can't email you, it comes back as undeliverable from the link on your site."

"Sir, I've inserted a piece of junk text into the email link to keep spambots from harvesting it. It should be pretty easy for you to remove." [for reference, the obfuscation strategy is rock stupid - mailto: blah@NOSPAM.blah.blah ]

I've gotten no fewer than -three- phone calls on exactly the same subject this week.

All of which dovetails nicely with the new login notification the clever hellsop added this week: 2003-Aug-18: Firewalled part of Korea (61.111.0.0/20) off from connecting to the email port, for either having a really broken spam engine or a pathetic DoS attack. This appeals to my innate amusement at small parts of my life actually imitating art I enjoy. In this case, it would be the Walled City of Gibson's Idoru - the small electronic community that basically said, "Goodbye World," and delinked from everyone else, except by invitation.