*sigh*

My email has been spammed.

Nowt so unusual in that, you might think, in a world where well over 80% of the entire email traffic is spam, but having learned my lesson with my very first (publicly accessible) email address back in 1997, I'd taken great pains to protect it and... until yesterday at least... been pretty successful.

I've owned my own domain for several years and, having never entered either of my main email addresses at that domain in any forums, online forms, or anywhere it might have been harvested, have managed to stay blissfully spam-free.

Indeed you may remember me mentioning back in September that the aforementioned original email address had bitten the electronic bullet, which reduced my spam count from the low teens per day to one or two per WEEK. It didn't half feel quiet around my Inbox I can tell you.

A few months ago I did get a hint that the honeymoon was over, as a small trickle of spam started to arrive. I was lulled into thinking it might be a passing phase, as numbers remained small and far between. I should have known better. Having made it onto one list - I have no idea how - it was only a matter of time before the list was sold on, and the heavy spammers started to hit me. That time came yesterday, with over a dozen invitations to visit an online drugstore in the space of five minutes. The pile has been increased today, to the point where I've had to create a new rule or two.

Sad, but inevitable I suppose. And yet a small part of me retains its heated indignation that, when the email servers of the world are kicking out their metric tonnes of CO2 by the second to no other purpose than sending reams and reams of shit flying around the planet so that yet more servers can apply carefully crafted algorithms to delete them again before anyone reads them, no-one has yet considered this to be a serious enough problem to actually do much about it.