Category Archives: This Blog

This, my friends, is the 300th post on The 100 Billionth Person blog.  The number 300 is significant in many of life’s endeavors:

• In baseball, a batting average of .300 or more is excellent.

• A baseball pitcher who has 300 lifetime wins is a hall-of-fame candidate.

• In bowling, a score of 300 is a perfect game.

• In football, the distance between the goal lines is 300 feet.

• It takes a pressure of 300 pounds per square inch to crack open a macadamia nut.

• It takes 300 barrels of water to produce one barrel of beer.

• There are 300 varieties of asparagus.

• Couples fight 300 times a year.

• In the United States, there is one lawyer for every 300 people (or 150 fighting couples).

But forget all that.  We are here to celebrate the 300th post on this blog.  Here is a lookback on the posts that entertained the handfuls of you who care.  Thanks for joining me.

The 100 Billionth Person: 300 Posts, 300 Seconds

I have had to remove the email update notification feature from The 100 Billionth Person.  Apparently, some internet services (like AOL) have decided that my notification messages are spam.  This has caused other email sent from my chcollins.com account to be rejected at the destination.

It is sad that services like AOL and SpamCop cannot distinguish between a spammer who sends out a million emails and a blog subscription service with less than ten subscribers, but until I find a better way to notify readers of updates, you will need to visit more often.   Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: 6/2/2013

I can think of two ways that my update notices and other email may have come to be treated as spam by internet services.  My best guess as to the cause: my wife may have clicked on a malware link in an email that harvested her email address, as well as the addresses of those in her address book.  A spammer would then use her email address as the fake source of the spam.  Spam detection services (“spam cops”) would then put my wife’s email address on a blacklist, preventing her email from reaching its destination.  Since she has a chcollins.com account, other email from chcollins.com would also be suspect.

It is also possible (and likely) that robots attempted to “subscribe” to my blog using a fake email address.  My subscription app would then send out a confirmation email, providing a spammer my blog email address and my server IP address.  Again, the spammer could use my email information to send spam and thus poison my account.

I keep thinking, I’m just a little guy on the internet, who would want to bother with me?  But I have come to realize that it is the little guys who are the most vulnerable, for that very reason.  We are easy marks.  This isn’t your 1999 world wide web, Dorothy.