Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts publicly. I’ve enjoyed them immensely for the past hour and am grateful for your fluid, humorous writing and well-supported statements.

Since you enjoy the “Then and Now” contrast, I recommend Ze Frank’s “Young Me/Now Me” site at http://www.zefrank.com/youngmenowme/. You may have already come across it, but if not, it’s worth a look!

My feeling is this: if nothing comes up, no one barfed.

Another option, and one I recommend to the users, is to have two separate, unconnected e-mail accounts. One is an official e-mail account (from someone like Gmail), and another is what you could call a “throw-away” account. This account would be the one you would use for website registrations and the like. All the spam would get directed to that account, while leaving the “official” account mostly spamless. This isn’t a bulletproof method by any stretch, but I have found it to be effective.