Josiah and family:
Hello. I too would like to offer my condolences, and to express my utmost respect for what Josh did, and for what he shared with us, all these years. If I may, I'd like to share some personal experiences about how I became a SpamGourmet user, and why this service has meant so much for me, in my geeky way to offer a tribute to Josh's memory.
I was a humble foreign student, arrived in the U.S. in the early 1990's for college. Having grimaced all my life at the exhobitant courier fees charged to send overnight letters from a small Caribbean island to... well, anywhere else in the world, I was amazed upon seeing "E-mail" in action for the first time: "WHAT? This 2-page long letter got delivered to Europe in under 5 seconds, at no extra charge?!?!". Shortly after graduation, I was probably among the early adopters of web-based e-mail, back when for example Hotmail was still an independent start-up, its HTML-only pages displayed incoming messages reasonably fast... even over a 56 Kbps modem. And yes, it had a storage limit; I recall it was something around 15 to 30 MB per account.
I had enjoyed reading and posting messages on UseNet for almost a decade, and never felt the need to hide or obfuscate my personal e-mail address. Back then we were mostly students, researchers, and professionals, sharing info, and fanning the good ole flame wars on UseNet. Fast forward a few years, and by the end of the 1990's the spams were out of control. I distinctly remember having been mailbombed by a spammer who took temporary control of a corporate mail server in Atlanta, and filled my meager inbox in a matter of minutes, offering me some pharmaceutical product I can't recall. (Nope, nothing to do with male virility, Pfizer was not yet a household name.) That's when I began "researching" how to spoof e-mail addresses, making messages appear to be from "Me_RemoveYourPants@SomeDomain.com" and signed as "Remove your pants before e-mailing me", etc. Some sys admins stopped me cold though: "Forging SMTP headers is against our institutional policy, blah blah blah".
Then for a few months I learned about WHOIS, reverse DNS lookups, ARIN, etc. I thought I could join the bandwagon of activists who encouraged netizens to report spams to the domain administrators. I remember with irony all the increasingly nasty complaints I sent to KrNIC.kr, the poor DNS admins in South Korea that I complained so loudly at, because their customer sub-domains kept bombarding me with e-mails daily, if not hourly, filled with question marks and other seemingly-non-printable characters. One of my accounts could only be accessed over a Telnet session, using "pine" (a text based e-mail client). Accidentally displaying a message with insufficiently-decoded Asian characters would throw my VT100 terminal into unrecoverable states of malfunction, and force me to kill the connection and restart reading all e-mails... including the dozens or hundreds that I had marked for deletion, but did not commit to deleting upon killing the connection.
It would be a few more years before I'd learn about multi-byte character encoding schemes, how two question marks would become one Hangul character, etc. I did learn fast enough that it was not productive to ask DNS registrars to pull the plug on their corporate customers in Seoul, Lagos, Moscow, etc. That activism died a suffocating death, drowned by the ever-increasing volume of spams sent with total impunity, and anonymity. And for those poor DNS admins, their commitment to customer servce, to respond to less-than-civil complaints, died an equally horrible death.
All these horrors, frustrations, fruitless efforts at "pushing back at the man" went on until around 2004. I must have read some online news article about methods to combat spam, and became aware of SpamGourmet. The rest is history, as far as I'm concerned: I finally gained a reasonable measure of control over how much spam would actually make it into my Inbox, and finally could smile when the car salesperson would ask "How did you manage to get an e-mail at our company,
JoesClunkers.1.me@SpamGourmet.com", to which I could sincerely respond "I just created this e-mail account just for you, to make sure only your important messages can get through to me... and nothing else!".
All my best to Josh and family!!!
super_copy