I awakened, this morning, to a shitstorm of comment spam. My initial plans for the day were to troubleshoot the connectivity issues on my LAN, but that priority receded when I noted that the spammer had evaded Jay Allen’s excellent MT spamfighter, MT-Blacklist, by entity-encoding their URLs.

From 8 until 11 or so I fought the demon on the mountain and in the pit. Once I defeated it, I began to look for a solution. Allen is not updating the MT 2.x versions of MT-Blacklist; so I thought, OK, maybe this is the day I finally upgrade to MT3.

I bought the app and initiated the installation process. All went well.

Until I tried to log in, realized I had forgotten my password, and pressed the helpful-seeming link, ‘Forgot your password?’

Ages later, the dialog helpfully informed me that the password had been reset, and that the new password had been emailed to me. I refreshed my gmail screen. Nothing.

Still nothing.

I ssh’ed into my server and checked the mail logs. There was a record noting that the mail had been queued, but it did not make it to gmail. I tried a wide variety of means to access my mail; but alas, it was jammed up tighter than [insert favorite relative here]’s colon the day after Thanksgiving.

So now it’s 5pm. The logjam has been cleared, but it’s still unclear what the problem was – the symptoms were verrrrry sloooow processing times for certain sorts of I/O on the server. Peculiarly, the CPU monitor on the box was not even close to being hammered – the slowdown was something else. I deleted some lock-tracking files, which may have had something to do with it; or the server may have molassessed by a comment-spam assault. I really don’t know at this point.

But that email problem just confirms what I already know – I have to farm out email. Why the hell are all the 3rd party email providers so sucky in terms of features/pricing?

I believe I sense a business opportunity.

UPDATE:

Wow, the spambots are still hammering away. It’s war, apparently.