It has been a bad day for spam. In one day, the first of my formerly pristine 200ok emails started receiving spam (I feel so violated, it was never even publically posted); then this weblog got a sudden influx of comment spam.

My options with blogger are to moderate all comments or enable the CAPTCHA. I've gone with the CAPTCHA as the lesser of two evils (it has an audio alternative so it's not too bad - not perfect, but not too bad).

Occasionally I wonder how the net survives under the extraordinary weight of spam that clogs it at every opportunity. If we got 15 telemarketing calls every day, we'd unplug the phone. Why do we endure email spam?

How do we keep in touch with friends when we have to abandon email addresses due to spam? How do we do business when our email gateways are being hammered by spam? How do we have meaningful comment threads when we have to put in CAPTCHAs just to filter out the morons trying to sell stupid stuff?

Does everyone just get used to wading through spam? I guess I was lucky. I had a year off after getting my own domain. It was awesome. I guess the honeymoon is over.