Cautiously re-entering the e-mail waters.

I just nervously re-enabled the e-mail forwarding feature for my domain to an existing e-mail address. Allow me to explain the “nervous” part.

Years ago, mjbdiver.com was a regular web site with galleries of photos, music and animations. On the front page I had posted my e-mail address as a regular mailto: link for those visitors wishing to send me e-mail. This was well before I realized this was probably not such a good idea.

Soon I started getting tons of e-mail, but not the kind I wanted. As you may have guessed, my e-mail address was harvested to receive endless bombardments of junk e-mail. It got so annoying that I decided to remove it from my domain account and create a second e-mail address that I would use with more caution. Immediately the junk e-mail stopped and I was getting e-mail I actually wanted to get.

Over time I began to wonder if it was safe to go back to the original e-mail address I had set up. Re-enabling it served only to re-open the floodgates as the junk e-mail came pouring in harder than ever, so I removed it from my account again and stayed with the second e-mail address for the remainder of my domain’s existence.

When it came time to renew my domain, I let it expire instead as I was losing interest in continuing my web site. It changed owners several times before being re-released back into the domain pool where I would re-claim it years later.

And now I have nervously re-enabled mail forwarding from my domain to an existing e-mail address, using the same addresses I created years ago, including the one that got slammed with spam. It remains to be seen if these spammers still have all the e-mail addresses they ever harvested from the Web. Time will tell.