First, you need to know that the email address jon@mentata.com is no longer valid for directly contacting me. If you want to reach me by email, use the address you find on the Mentata services page. I'm now just a man, which is all I ever could be anyway.

As everybody online knows, unsolicited email (spam) has been a growing problem in recent years and is now reaching pandemic proportions. I've been lucky: between the beginning of 2002 to the end of October, I collected a mere 6,320 such missives. During that time, I went from getting 19 spam messages per month to over 50 per day. In just the last month that rate has more than doubled!

Don't you people understand? I need something to make mine shorter!

Curious about the pathology of this irritant, I made study. I have one address that I share with select retailers when they request one, opting out of any direct marketing; it now gets virtually nothing but unsolicited email. With my new domain I decided to methodically determine what, besides relying on the trustworthiness of organizations who only want my money, would get me so thoroughly spammed. I boldly put mailto links on every page of this web site, but even after my content got a thorough indexing by the search engines and a boom in traffic, I didn't get a single piece of spam. I joined several mailing lists with my trusted address, occasionally listing it in plain text in the signature, but still nothing happened. I posted the address on weblogs and usenet, and despite many warnings about what may happen, I still didn't get any regular spamming. Then I tripped the wire: last month I associated the email address with my domain name in the interNIC database. From that day on, spam of all shape and color entered my inbox and made itself right at home.

I have no interest in straining my eyes and wasting my time filtering this garbage manually, so I'm taking the path of least resistance and jumping ship. I was amused recently to come across the attempt of another creative soul to fight the tide of spam. I can't imagine this tack is successful, but in honor of his ingenuity and courage I dedicate a German translation to my gospel example (I already have a Swedish one). Check it out by verse, chapter, book, or file of LDIF updates.

I've heard our venerable justice system is coming to the rescue, but I might be too busy keeping the flying donkeys out of my yard to see it prevail. It didn't seem to take that much to force service providers to trash their privacy policies and hand over the identities of people sharing music over the internet, but the plain truth is that corporations and lobbying groups have methods of motivating government that just aren't as available to the rest of us.

Speaking of music, it's time to release my first single...

A Favor

from the album Tent Sin Towards
by Hilfiger Tout

I dedicate this song to my own fat head and big mouth. After all, I probably ruined more than an email address this year :)