While I was offline for 4 days, I returned to find only 400+ email messages in the inbox. Of these, more than 300 were spam. Thunderbird does an okay job of spam filtering, but I still had to comb through and mark more than 150 new Junk sources. On our slow 26 Kbps dial up here at the cabin, it took an agonizingly slow time to process, and in fact, I just let it work about 20 minutes to clear out the cruft.
On the other hand, updating my 100 or so RSS feeds in NetNewsWire took about only 60 seconds to update, even on the slow connection.
This difference, in getting information of value to time and effort spent getting it, is remarkable. I need e-mail and rely on it for important communication, but the process of getting to it, while affected by a slow network access here, is significant in terms of the relative paucity of really important or interesting things in my inbox compared to me RSS reader.
So the burning question is when will email start being subjugated, ignored?
And the spammers were not only busy over the Fourth of July, the hackers were too, with apparently some well publicized issues in WordPress as well as other apps using XML-RPC in PHP. Yes, I did get my WordPress updated, but I wish they had a download of changed files only.
Oh well, the blogging machine is now in the “On” position…
