"But I don't like spam..."

Okay, I've had it. I just spent close to 20 minutes deleting comments from this blog that were really advertisements. For some reason or other, the spam killer didn't stop them. My blog gets between 10 and 20 pieces of spam on a slow day. Sometimes as many as five in an hour. I get email notifications of everything. And the Blogger spam filters take out most of it, this is just what is left.


Years ago, I was one of the people running radio free brattleboro, an unlicensed radio station. One day, the agency in charge of regulating the airwaves, the FCC, came knocking on our door. As I handled most of the station's email, and was one of the three people who could speak for the station, my personal email was given out as a press contact. This was done without consultation with me - I would have created another email account for such a purpose. Within the space of a couple of months, my personal email account was a constant spam target.

The sound file which notifies me that a new email has arrived just did it's thing. I have just gotten the third piece of spam as a comment to this blog since I started this message.

I just told the Democrats to take me off their mailing lists - even though the election is over, I am still getting about 10 emails a day asking me to support the President. I just sent "remove" emails to a number of other activist organizations; I did not sign up for most of them. I can't take the constant need, the constant trumpeting of despair. I have problems too, and I can not solve all the world's by spending a couple of hours a day reading, becoming informed, and signing petitions.

The WVEW radio station's email is forwarded to me. I get their spam, too.
I also have emails flying back and forth between myself and other Board members over running the station. I also get emails from station participants and people who want to get involved or get their own show. And public service announcements. And people from as far away as Texas who want to either submit shows or have us interview them about their self published books.

The upshot is that since 8:30am this morning, over 150 pieces of email made it past the spam filters and into my inbox. This is not an unusual amount.

And it's not as bad as it used to be! At one point, I had my ISP put my personal email address on hold and all the spammers (300 pieces a day at that point) got their mail bounced. It actually helped, for awhile.

But for now, I've had enough. I'm unsubscribing from as many things as I can.
It's time to get control of my inbox again.

Therefore, because of the spam problem with this blog, although I really do not wish to do it, I am installing comment moderation and one of those horrible match the word things until the mess comes under control.

My apologies.

p.s. I belong to a mail list which is a local "free cycle" program in which people post things they wish to get rid of which still have life left in them. I decided to unsubscribe. After clicking on the "unsubscribe" button, I got an email form to use. I clicked "unsubscribe" again. Then I got an email which sought to make sure that I had sent the request, and another button to click to unsubscribe. I clicked. A few minutes later, I got an email confirming that I had unsubscribed. Really now. I am not making this up.