– Background –

This address has been in use for a long while; in Internet years I would call it middle aged. It has traveled around a good bit as well, having been used in various mailing lists, newsgroups, and for myriad online signups for this and that.

In some significant ways it is not a typical e-mail address, primarily because it has been used in anti-spam efforts. This has doubtless caused it to be even more exposed to millions of CDs and spam hydrants than it might have otherwise been.

I get a lot of mail to this address. A whole lot. It is on several high-volume mailing lists, plus it has been very well distributed to friends and acquaintances over the years.

I get a lot of spam to this address. A whole lot. A whole stinking, spewing, heaving torrent of a lot of spam. I get so much spam to this address that I am compelled to turn on spaminator/brightmail/whatever-they-call-it-today at my service provider [1]. In addition to the aforementioned efforts by my service provider, I also do a fair bit of filtering/sorting/divining locally in an attempt to separate the wheat from the remaining chaff and to sort list mail into relevant heaps.

If I turn off my provider’s filters and rely solely on my local filters, the incoming mailstream is so polluted as to render the address useless, primarily due to the amount of time needed to sift through the messages to find those I truly want.

For a great many practical, personal, and selfish reasons I do not want this address to become useless to the point of having to abandon
it. Example: because it has been so widely distributed to friends and acquaintances (and because address book maintenance is still a manual
task), if someone were to give my e-mail address to someone else it is extremely likely that this address would be the one they would give them… [Continued]