Sorry for the spam

2024-04-22

This is an odd circumstance for sure. Many months ago I got a few emails from people trying to contact me with subjects like ‘We can email blast your blog to thousands of people’. I didn’t think much of it since I this seem dubious at best and I only want to connect with people who want to read the blog. I am not trying to sell anything or become famous, I just want to connect with a few people. But I noticed something out of place a few weeks ago, I was getting some email rejects / spam messages about a blog post from emails that I didn’t recognize. After getting more than one or two of these I looked at the DB (database) and I saw I had 894. That is way too many subscription, so clearly this was some kind of bot signing up people. I will try to look at the logs and see if there is some pattern. But given all of this I wanted to make things right, so here is my plan:

• I fixed the website to verify if you own an email address before subscribing
• Going to inactivate all of the subscriptions
• Going to reactivate the subscriptions of my friends and family

Sorry if you were on the people being spammed with my emails without signing up, I did not mean to annoy you. -Gary