Smartiplants reported in her JournalScape blog that she was receiving junk mail via her JournalScape e-mail address. I confess I was not at all convinced that was the case, but in view of the mountain of junk mail I deal with every day, I thought I would try to test her hypothesis.

I have an e-mail address through my ISP by default. In the two years I've had connectivity through this ISP their default e-mail address for me has received NO e-mail at all except for the internal notifications by the provider. I had given out this address to no one, because I had no desire to monitor three e-mail addresses (and their subsequent junk mail).

Perfect, I thought. I asked Smartiplants whether it was her e-mail address used to receive automatic notifications of journal entries that was the point of interception or the address posted on her journal itself ("Email Me"). She said it was the latter.

And so it is. Two or three days after changing my email address on this page, I have begun receiving junk mail at that address. And they cannot have sourced it from anywhere else. Rats! I really like JournalScape and I'm not leaving.

That said, I guess we'll just have to put up with a little junk mail. Do you think if I took the email address down it would be better? The address is probably out there in the wild by now, being sold as part of junk lists, which proliferate like STDs. Sigh.