AFTER FOUR YEARS of entombing my stripes identity in a cesspool of spam, I resurrected the account by using the symbol Pi on the mailman.iol.ie control panel. It's a very obtuse thing to do but not unlike finding a secret door in Hogwarts. The Greek symbol activated some ruthless spam blocking alongside hundreds of rules I've invoked to block spam at the door. Then I forwarded all the mail into another spam-cruncher at work and voila! I am getting fewer than two pieces of spam for every 100 e-mails.
I'm keeping things that way by not giving out the address. Clever readers can figure it out from context. Clean emails are priceless. Sure, I can make them up and throw them away but the world values permanence. Having an e-mail address from the days Ireland OnLine was still a BBS feels cool even though it marks me as a senior citizen on the Irish internet.
