How I Beat Spam

Without Having to Change My email Address

My email address has been around online for many, many years, and it gets a lot of spam — many hundreds per day. For most users, spam far outstrips legitimate mail. It was 1996 that I realized that spam would become a huge problem, which is why I wrote my Spam Primer to educate my readers about it. And sadly I was right: it’s estimated that more than 90 percent of all email transmitted is spam. And how many of them get to my inbox? Lately, I’m averaging less than one a day.

Continue Reading

Expanding True’s Sources

A quick note about This is True’s story sources. When I started True, I wanted my stories to be from “mainstream, legitimate newspapers” — with an early addition being the weekly news magazines (like Time and Newsweek). I’ve always stayed away from broadcast sources, since I always want a printed version of a story to rely on.

Continue Reading

Missing In Action

There was no free edition on Friday, August 22. There were definitely reasons for that, and at first I decided I wasn’t going to say all the reasons why. But after thinking about it, and recovering from the problem I’m about to tell you about, I decided I owed you an explanation.

Continue Reading

Yahoo Debacle Update

Last week I announced a major disaster, and asked for your help in getting the word out about True to help reverse the problem. A good number of you listened, and helped. Thank you. While the threat isn’t gone, this newsletter will be able to continue.

Continue Reading

Yahoo Alert: True’s Biggest Crisis Ever

Note: This is long-since solved, but leaving the page up for context, since many sites linked to it. -rc

I’ve given up trying to work with Yahoo, which represents the largest domain subscribed to True. There are more than 20,000 addresses within the Yahoo.com domain on True’s distribution (plus a couple thousand more on variants such as yahoo.co.uk, yahoo.ca, etc.)

Continue Reading

Playboy likes True

If you made it to this page after reading about This is True in Playboy, you’ve at least proven that you do read the articles! This is True is the thinking person’s humor publication, just as Playboy might be considered the thinking person’s men’s magazine. I humbly believe Playboy agrees, since This is True and/or I have now been featured in their pages four five six times (no pictures, thankfully).

Continue Reading

A Family of Readers

Felix in California sent me an error report Monday (I left a confusing extraneous word after recasting a sentence when I was writing). He posted the error just 11 minutes and 44 seconds after the Premium edition was sent out, and his report enabled me to fix the error for the free edition.

Continue Reading

Verizon: We Know Better than You

Verizon subscribers have had quite the go of it the past few weeks. Three weeks ago their spam filter tripped on a single word in the issue, so the Premium edition was blocked from everyone at Verizon (and their subsidiaries, like GTE.net) — even if you had followed my recommendation and put thisistrue.com and lyris.net aweber.com in your personal “whitelist.”

Continue Reading

Big Changes at TRUE Central

We’ve been totally swamped lately. It wasn’t just the GOOHF water bottles, which were extremely popular and the huge quantity we were able to get sold out in about a month (but sorry: we really can’t get any more, since the manufacturer discontinued them — figures!).

Continue Reading