A long time ago (maybe 12 years, maybe more?) I signed up with a startup called mail.com, which promised free email forwarding for life. I started to use that as my primary email, since I was moving around a lot. Turns out they lied—they closed my account after a couple of years, saying in effect "what are you going to do, sue us?" They were right, I wasn't going to. So I moved my email to bigfoot.com…
Since then, bigfoot.com has dutifully forwarded email sent to my address there. They aren't even really primarily an email services company any more; they still offer it, but I had to use Google to find where they'd even hidden the admin interface these days. I suppose, though, that they've made the calculation that it costs them almost nothing to run the free basic service, that a few folks are still paying them, and so why not? Good for them.
In the meantime, my email world has changed remarkably. Search engines like AltaVista and Google came into existence, and made it easy to find my email address. It became fairly easy for me to set up my home gateway machine as a dedicated email server, with its own domain name. Most recently, I achieved tenure; I expect to be reachable at Portland State for the foreseeable future.
Worst of all, the spam trickled and then flooded its way into the email space. It gushes onto me from all sides now, and tries to drown me.
I took a look at the headers of a particularly obnoxious spam email tonight; turns out it was addressed to my bigfoot.com account. So I dug back through my 15,000-message inbox. Turns out that I had 1,000 spam emails addressed to bigfoot.com, and not one legitimate message that I could find in the last several years. That's perhaps 10% of my total spam.
SO I closed my bigfoot.com account just now. I'll miss it. I applaud those folks for keeping their end of the bargain. Maybe I'll come back some day, after the spam problem is solved, just for old times sake.
Goodbye, Bigfoot. (B)