On a subject that is critical to the smooth running of Contra, 2005 was the year that Internet service providers lowered the boom on spam. The contention that spam is a minor inconvenience that customers can simply delete has given way to an awareness that it also saps productivity, and the place to stop it is where it enters the system, while it can be filtered in a wholesale fashion.

Most providers try to filter on the basis of content, but that tends to lead to a cat-and-mouse game where spamsters continually make slight adjustments to content, while ISPs try gamely to keep up.

All of which means we are sliding inexorably towards the concept of an authenticated sender -- i.e. "I know you, so I will accept mail from you; all others, be dashed." This can be done by means of a "safe list," a "white list," or sometimes a "contact list."

This change in philosophy has a direct effect on our ability to send you our email updates. Because we do not receive an error notice if our message is redirected to a spam folder, there is no way for us to know if you receive the updates. For this reason, the issue of missing emails is solidly in your court.

The headers of our updates contain two email addresses -- contra@email.com and contra@3web.net -- so both addresses must be on your safe list. Incidentally, if you wish to contact us about any general administrative issues, contra@email.com is the best address to use.

"Yeah, but just a sec," you say. "If I don't know when you are sending an email update, how do I know if I am missing something." Argggh, there's the rub.

To deal with this we will begin sending verification emails quarterly on April 10, July 10 and October 10. If you do not receive these test emails, review your email settings.

If that does not work, let us know and we'll attempt to help you through the problem. However, since there is no consistency in the way that ISPs deal with this issue, we can't possibly know how to deal with all the permutations.

In addition, we post the dates of our email releases on our website here. If you haven't received anything you find there, you'll know that you're out of the loop.