Sometimes when people visit my blog they are annoyed that I don't have an "about me" or a contact page set up.  Well, there's a reason for that.

First of all, I monitor all my comments on this blog.  So if someone really wants to get a message to me they can leave a comment and I will most definitely see it.  That's the method I prefer if a visitor has something to say to me.  I love comments and interaction.

Secondly, I hate spam.  So by intentionally not publishing my email address on the site I have hoped to avoid getting spammed to death.  I've already had to abandon one email address because of an intense spam problem and since I would like to be able to keep the email address that I use now I try not to put it out on the internet anywhere.

So, lately my email notifications in connection with my blogs has been slow.  E-mail notices, for instance, when I have a comment to moderate, have been taking hours, if not days to get to me, if they arrive at all.  I have just been checking the blogs manually for comments.

I contacted my server to see what might be wrong with sendmail.  They checked and got back to me right away to tell me exactly what the problem was.  I had 1,918,368 - that's nearly 2 million - spam messages to undeliverable email addresses at AbsolutelyTrue.  Since I don't use an email address connected with the site, all emails addressed to anyone @ this.com are undeliverable.  So, to further compound the problem, the setting on the server was to forward all undeliverable emails to another email address... which, as it turns out, is the email address that I previously had to abandon because of the spam.  So, those forwarded undeliverable emails were bouncing back to my server again.. and as you can imagine, things got quite clogged.

The good news is that the problem is now fixed and the undeliverable emails will simply be rejected at the server level.  Now I should be getting all my notifications fairly quickly.