Once upon a time, an author could include a helpful reference on a web page so that readers could email them. It was called the "mailto: URL."

These were the Good Old Days of the digital wilds, where communication had less hindrance than it does now. Always wanting to be helpful, I put my email address on every one of my web pages. As the size and quantity of my web sites grew, so did the number of times my email address was listed on the Internet. Time passed, and all the mirrors of one of my sites (both official and unofficial) meant that my email address was then plastered over literally tens of thousands of web pages on the Net.

Fast forward to the "Now", and the latest virus variants (which are oh-so-kind enough to mine people's web page caches) look for email addresses. I get tens of thousands of hits every day on my web pages, and if even a very small number of people who visit get infected with the latest virus that exploits this, it just spells D.O.O.M. for me.

Case in point was the Sobig.F virus variant that hit in August 2003. As I write this, I have suffered for several weeks under a flood of copies of the virus, incoming at a rate that is blasphemous to getting any ACTUAL communication accomplished. At the height of the infection I was getting 100 copies of the virus EVERY 2 MINUTES. Even though the received rate is down to ~65,000 per week (down from over 150,000), I am forced to take drastic measures. I am REALLY glad I have Procmail set up, but at this point I'll try anything else that I can to stem the tide.

If you need to contact me, please use the address below:


[And if you are a spam harvester or a virus, you can just go away now... DO YOU HEAR ME VIRUSES! GO AWAY! =)]