And I blame Hotmail.
I have had a Hotmail account(s) for well over ten years now. In fact, I think the only communication tools I use that are older are ICQ and the US Postal Service. I used to use the hotmail address specifically as a gaming account. Whenever I registered for a game, online or otherwise, I would use that email. By the time I stopped using it, about 8 or so years ago, it had become utterly useless as an email account due to the vast amount of spam it collected. I haven’t been to the in-box there in I don’t know how long and, unless they recycle inactive accounts, I shudder to think of what the spam box must look like.
Still, though, I used their IM service to keep in touch with some friends, so I didn’t turn it off completely, regardless of how much the MSN Messenger application sucks tiny brown dust bunnies. Interestingly, to this day, I have friends who use only MSN Messenger. I also have friends that use only ICQ, and others that use only Yahoo, so, naturally, I switched to solutions that allowed me to run a single app. Currently, I use Pidgin (thanks Nick!), and I find it more than suitable for my minimal needs (not to mention it has a very active dev community). But, alas, I digress… back to Messenger.
I am not sure how I am suddenly such a popular fellow to the IM Spam artists out there. I don’t publish my hotmail address anywhere. I don’t publish my MSN handle anywhere. Somehow, though, I have landed on some porn site’s list, and I am getting flooded with adverts for webcams bimbos and other assorted nonsense. I just received my fifth since starting this post, actually.
The reason I blame Hotmail? They are easy to blame, and they won’t care anyway. And they are owned by MS, so what other reason do I really need? Most likely it has nothing to do with Hotmail at all, though. Most likely someone mined MSN addresses from somewhere and mine got sold to some crazy blast IM service not too different from the blast email services that fill up our in-boxes with Cialis ads.
Needless to say, I am a bit irked. But, there is a solution to my irkness. Those of you whom I chat with on MSN, you have about a week (or less, depending on my mood) to contact me about my handles on other services (ICQ, GTalk, Yahoo, AOL). After that, I am going to disappear from MSN, most likely for good. In the world of IM, there are other options, and one less app to load at startup makes me happy.
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