Views from Medina Road

Yes, I've been remiss about posting here recently, but I will skip the usual excuses this time. My ideal of course is to post something every day, as all good bloggers should, something short and pithy at least, but this would entail a controlled, harmonious existence in which interruptions and distractions are minimized, in which the appearance of balance and fortitude are in fact the situation. I like to imagine this might be true for me, someday, and I solemnly note the many other bloggers who seem to manage their output more consistently than I've been able to. I can only plead that the website itself takes priority; this blog is a lagniappe, for the 7 people who read it.

Today's pithy comment is about spammers. I mentioned a while back, facetiously, about going through the day's 10,000 spam. It was an exaggeration then; it isn't now. As domain administrator I still try to skim all the emails addressed *@locusmag.com, in hopes of catching the occasional misspelled or invalidly addressed (locusonline@locusmag.com; locsu@locusmag.com, etc.) email for something worth catching, but I'm on the verge of sending it all automatically to the bit bucket. My title query is to wonder what spammers are thinking when they send thousands of spam a day to obviously nonsensical email addresses -- moody@locusmag.com, fuller@locusmag.com, AmbroseXTishahick@locusmag.com, to pick 3 from the spam folder at random. Who do they think would ever see these emails? The number of spam received at legitimate addresses -- online, locus, mark, and a couple others @locusmag.com -- is a small proportion of the total.

UPDATE to reply to commentator Rick -- Hi Rick, but this is Mark, not Charles. See upper right corner. Charles does the magazine, I do the website, and this blog. Thanks for reading!