Slamland 2

The spammers have decided that us little guys are not to be allowed to run our own email servers anymore. They didn’t do it via legal machinations rather, they did it the old-fashioned way; brute force.

This is the end of a 7+ month battle between spammers and myself. Until 3 months ago, I ran my own self-hosted mail server. All my domains were on it. I have just taken that system off-line permanently.

What happened is that I was getting barraged by 250+ spams per day on each account. My normal email was getting buried to the point that I couldn’t even find it. My mail bins were over-flowing with spam and I couldn’t even sort it from the legitimate stuff. MS Outlook was no help either. The Outlook rules processing was taking loads of time from my laptop and it still wasn’t effective. Long story shortened, after trying some seriously hefty solutions, including some paid front-end services, I had to give it up. There is no way to keep ahead of the spammers and still get my real work done. I was spending hours per day on it instead of on writing, marketing, and sales. It wasn’t doing my blood pressure any good either.

I have now gone to the dark-side and opened Gmail accounts. After months of testing, it is confirmed that Gmail does what they say on the label, they kill all spam. Yes, my new email addresses no longer have my personal domain names in them but I don’t get the spam either. Neither do I have to spend the hours of maintenance required to keep the mail server alive (it was continually choking on the sheer volume of spam).

It will probably take a few months before I get around to updating all my accounts with the new addresses but then contacting me will be easier and I will be more responsive. Sometimes we have to pick and choose the battles that we engage in. Are they worth the bother? In the end, what is more important, focusing on core activities or fighting over principles (principles that don’t put a single dime in my coffers)? No government could have passed a law that would get me to do this but the spammers simply wore me down.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

It’s a Texan , magazine called The Red Pub. I got there via recommendation of nightwind292, thanks Nightwind .

Prior to this, I had never considered submitting to publications, only to my own blog. They wanted a conservative author and Nightwind nudged me over there.  I wrote an article, about 1,200 words, over the course of two days. I submitted it yesterday. Now to see if they accept it. If they don’t, I can always post it here

The main thing is that they are definitely a Houston rag and their main thing is Houston and Texas. I know Houston fairly well as my second wife (~10 years)  is a Texas Cajun from Nederland, Texas. I also have a nephew in Austin, TX. I am not a reporter and I think that the article that I submitted will make that clear. It is an Op-Ed piece.

Oh well, if they accept it it’ll be all good. I had never planned on taking the Slamlander to print before so this is a new horizon of possibilities. Frankly, I could use the experience. I have never really had to Feed the Beast before, writing to a schedule. Well, I’ve always set internal schedules, you have to if you ever want to finish a novel and I can easily drop 2,000 words per day and print articles are usually 1,000-1,500 words. However, that isn’t the same thing as meeting publication deadlines. I hope that they will take me on

Note: If this shows up twice it means that I still cannot edit and resubmit articles to LJ.

Note2: It looks like edits are once more possible When did I fix that? *sigh* I’m feeling OLD.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.