This is a single post from deeden.co.uk made during the period May 2002 to April 2009. During a previous grand redesign I decided to make a break with the past and consign the old entries to history. This entry is from October 2003 and lives here forevermore.

A day without email

Today, so far, I have received 11 emails. 1 was spam, 5 were from WRGPT, 1 was my tv listings for tomorrow, 1 came from the css-discuss mailing list and 2 were emails about cron jobs that ran last night. The other was from Duggie, but we’ll get to that later.

Normally I’d receive hundreds of emails a day from various sources. Mailing lists of many kinds, the unavoidable spam, messages from friends and acquaintances and various updates from scripts. In the short time between checking my mail dozens can arrive in and need to be dealt with in one way or another. Today, barely anything.

It’s strange. If I’m away for a few days and can’t check my email it doesn’t bother me at all. I find it quite nice to get away from it for a few days, even though it means I have to wade through a sea of email when I return. Today is different. Today I expected to receive email. Some of the email I was looking forward to, bizarre as that may seem. Therefore it’s been a bit strange to receive barely any, and slightly disconcerting.

The reason for all this is that Duggie is being targetted by a spammer. Not directly, but via bounces. The sender, believed to be registereu.com, is sending the messages out with faked addresses from ninet.co.uk, causing Duggie to receive over 20,000 bounces in the last 24 hours and our shared machine to have a slight problem dealing with all of the attempted deliveries. Therefore if you’re expecting a reply from me, you might be waiting until the weekend for me to read your message.