I get a lot of spam. I get too much email. But even if you took out all the spam, I still get too much email.

As far as email is concerned, my eyes are bigger than my stomach. Like that person at the buffet who puts more food on their plate than they could ever possibly eat, I sign up for more email than I could ever possibly read.

I just can’t help it. I keep signing up for more stuff. I’ve been on the Internet for about 15 years and I already receive hundreds of emails per day. I would think that over time, the amount of email will only increase because I will have done more and more things that put my various email addresses on lists. In the course of living my life I get added to new email lists every day.

Every week, you can buy something over the Internet that you had to buy in a store the week before. Every day, I sign up for some newsletter or beta program or other thing on the Internet that needs to validate me by sending a confirmation email.

Nothing is taking me off of email lists. I manually remove myself occasionally, but nothing to compare to the rate at which I sign up for new things.

I already get more email than I can possibly read. I miss important emails because there is so much that I can’t keep up with it. Once something falls off the first screen of my Inbox I won’t ever see it again unless I specifically go looking for it.

Yet I keep signing up. Send me some more email, please. Thank you, sir. May I have another?

Did you get your new “dot me” domain? OtherInbox did! You can now read our blog at StopSpamming.me as well!

It’s been somewhat of a running joke in the email marketing community that the spam filtering companies don’t really have any incentive to “solve” the spam problem. After all, if they were to fix it, then they would be out of business!

In many ways, the spam filter companies could be compared to weapons manufacturers. Now, McAfee certainly isn’t as bad as Haliburton, in fact I think they are a good company that helps protect millions of people from spam and viruses. But like the weapons manufacturers don’t really want the wars to end, I don’t think the executives at McAfee are really interested in solving the spam problem.

This week BBC reported on the results of a study commissioned by McAfee to try and justify their perpetual existence. They came to the conclusion that you need a spam filter. “Surfing the web unprotected will leave the average web user with 70 spam messages each day.”

Wow, that was a striking conclusion. Who doesn’t have a spam filter? Every free email account, broadband email account, and most corporate email accounts have spam filters.

The BBC article ended with a quote that shows how self serving the whole thing was, “It is such an immense problem and it’s never going to go away. It’s no longer a question of solving it but one of managing it,” said Mr Dave De Walt, chief executive of McAfee.

Well Mr. De Walt, we haven’t given up yet.

At OtherInbox, we love open source and are looking for ways to share some of our labors with the community. Today I came across a great opportunity to contribute something to Ruby on Rails core development. I’m posting it here so everyone can see how easy it is to contribute.

I was building a JSON API to enable some new awesome features we’re working on. Following the JSON request specification, I had the client setting its MIME type to “application/jsonrequest”. But this was not causing Rails to recognize the request as JSON and thus the request body was not properly parsed. After doing some digging, I realized that Rails only looks for MIME type “application/json”.

Fortunately, MIME type processing is implemented really humanely in Rails, so I whipped up a little patch that adds “application/jsonrequest” as a synonym for the JSON MIME type. First I wrote a test to prove that this was a problem. Once I had a failing test, I added the MIME type, and got my test passing. I followed the git patch instructions on Lighthouse, then jumped into IRC #rails-contrib to garner support for it.

I happened to see that Rick Olson, the author of the existing JSON parsing code, was in the chat, so I pinged him with the lighthouse ticket. He tested it and applied it, and now our one line of code is a part of Rails!

Hopefully this will save some future JSON implementer a bit of pain.

I’m excited to be presenting some of the technical work behind OtherInbox at the Lone Star Ruby Conference on September 6th.

My talk is called “Ruby in the Cloud” and is a case study of our experiences using Ruby to deploy, monitor, and manage a cluster of servers running in the Amazon Web Services virtual cloud. I’m going to make the case that using Ruby to handle tasks traditionally handled by cron, shell scripts, and other more OS-specific technologies can make you more productive and agile. Hope to see you there!