After checking out the few spam messages that show up in my Gmail account on a somewhat regular basis, I decided it was time to let go of one of my oldest e-mail accounts. It is only used for a few old mailing lists that were never updated and the occasionaly out of touch friend, but appears to be the source for all incoming spam. Goodbye, dear moebius, you’ve served me well.
A few years ago I started paying for an e-mail forwarding service from Pobox. This was right in the middle of all the new pushes for free e-mail services (I still want to spit everytime I think of mail.com). After bouncing from server to server watching each one get overloaded with new users, I finally decided to pay for an address I wouldn’t have to keep changing. It worked out well, as they have also added a great spam filtering service which has cleaned my accounts up a hundredfold. Even when I initially switched to Gmail, the service was still very useful as I continued to employee one of the aliases as my primary point of contact.
But now I am not just using the Gmail interface and storage, but the address itself for almost all of my e-mail. So I changed the way my forwarding works. The Pobox accounts are used for signing up on mailing lists, registering products, communicating with unknown people, and backwards compatibility with sites containing my old information. This is all forwarded to my Gmail account where I can read it at my leisure and not have to worry about replying with my real address. People who actually know me can e-mail directly to the Gmail account. All of this is then forwarded to a server of mine for archival purposes. This setup filters out a lot of the unwanted cruft, provides me with an easy interface to all e-mail accessible from anywhere, and still archives it for my own personal backsup. But having such an old address around that had been bandied about so carelessly left a few leaks in the pipeline.
After 2 days sans the moebius persona, my spam box remains empty, and even the number of bounces and discards on the Pobox side have gone down dramatically. Le sigh, the end of another era.
Which reminds me, I have registered something like 5 or 6 new domains over the past couple weeks with at least one more to come. Two of them are for side projects I am working on – one for public consumption, the other not so much so (nothing inappropriate, it’s just something for a more select group of individuals). Yet another is for a “wedding blog” – guess I’ll have to tel Lisa about it. Thomslattery.com will probably never see the light of day, but I registered it anyway just to be safe. The others are up for some serious debate – I will be moving my bog sometime soon, and one of these names will be the new location (the rest might just be “abandoned’). I’m still debating whether or not to talk about them on this site and ask for opinions or make the decision on my own and reveal the new name and design all at once.
Boy, isn’t this all so exciting?!?!