Added 1 new A* page:Well after several years of waffling, I've knuckled down and got a public email address: smbhax@gmail.com. So yep, if you've been itching to email me, you can do so! Or just do it anyway! For future reference, that address is now on the "about" page (always accessible from the site's top menu), and while I'm at it I may as well mention that you can still reach me by the other routes listed therein, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, deviantART, and by private message on the A* forum.
Back to that in a moment but here's a new photo-based portrait a nice reader just had me do for them:
Okay anyway the email thing. Oh by the way, if you've already managed to wring one of my other, unpublished email addresses out of me, go ahead and keep using it, that's fine! And in particular if you're buying something from me, use the address you get from that process, as I do check that one assiduously so as not to be late on stuff people are actually shelling out hard-earned money for.
Why so secretive with the email addresses? Well let me tell you a story about ye olden dayes of the internet: back then we skipped merrily along in the sunlight of knowledge, discoursing freely and electronically with those sharing common intellectual pursuits, etc etc, and so forth. And it was good and stuff. Then man discovered spam, and it was less good; then came spambots and botnets, and it got pretty bad, and all those email links I'd been happily scattering about the internet were gobbled up and my inbox stuffed with tons of junk.
Being the stubborn sort and not wanting to lose that email address, I've had it on whitelist-only access for years, and have never published on the internet the address of any other email accounts I've accumulated, for fear that they would likewise fall under a hail of spam.
It has to be said that my ISP doesn't particularly specialize in email, and their spam filters, at least when I tried them in the past, were not so great. But I've heard good things from the kids about this fancy "gee mail" thing (I was holding out for Z mail but what are you gonna do), particularly its spam-resistant qualities, and I've heard and seen other webcomic authors making apparently useful use of public email addresses, AND I recently had to resort to using a Gmail account as a workaround for the php mail function on A*'s phpBB forum giving up the ghost, so I thought well heck, maybe things are different now (or rather, for at least the past five years) and I should give this a try.
Actually when it comes to that, I've noticed a decrease in spam to my other email addresses in the past year or so--instead of several hundred spam mails a day it might just be oh fifty or so. Almost starting to feel unloved! Seriously though, it can't be that progress is being made against spambot nets, can it? I thought they were supposed to be irresistibly taking over the world.
Oh well I'm sure it's more that they're just biding their time, waiting for all of us to re-publish our email addresses... >_>
Oh yeah and thanks to the helpful person who served as my sort of guinea pig for making sure I had this Gmail thingy working. =)
Um and I should mention--and if you've been following me around a bit you may already know this about me--that sometimes I do get a bit behind in my message queue, and may take a while to get back to you. But I always do eventually! So if you don't hear back right away, it isn't because I hate you or anything like that; it's just that sometimes I'm too chicken to look in my inbox for a while. =o
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