“The RoseBouquet”

The daily devotional blog/ezine, The Kingdom of Jesus, a study of Matthew, went off on Monday as planned with 10 subscribers to the ezine. When I checked right after, I discovered that two more had subscribed over night. That number is slowly creeping up, which is very encouraging. Yesterday one person even wrote for permission to use the second piece in a print newsletter for Nov/December.

In case you missed the announcement last week, you can find that daily blog right here at my RoseBouquet blog site, Daily Devotional or you can subscribe to get it by email at; Kingdom of Jesus. These are all short single page brief devotional studies of just a verse or paragraph in Matthew, where I look at what it means, and how I will apply that lesson to my life.

One thing I did last Friday was send out an invitation to subscribe to this new daily ezine using my RoseBouquet mailing list. An interesting thing happened. A small batch of subscriptions came in quickly, but I also saw a lot of bounces! That means, notification that those addresses on my RoseBouquet mailing list are duds! Nobody there.

I also got a notice from my web site system, saying that my one mail box was full and overflowing. I went to look and lo, there are 588 emails, almost every one is either a bounced message (over 4 months) from this ezine, or spam that got filtered out. Whoa! This is too much! So now I’m going to check that again after each mailing and carefully pull out the addresses to delete from my mailing list.

If you should hear some friend complain that they don’t get my ezine any more and they wonder why, ask them to look into the address they subscribed with, and to get back to me. I really don’t want to delete someone who IS somehow getting the RoseBouquet and counting on it, and I hope it doesn’t happen, but… who can tell?

I lost some hours from work every day last week, but am catching up as much as I can this week. One thing that is halting my makeover progress is this - You’ve heard of email (S)wamp (P)oured (A)t (M)e, right? [read the capitals]. Well, now those fools are doing it with robots that attack our forms on our web sites. I’ve been getting dumps of that garbage.

I asked at my host’s forums what to do about it, and was advised to take several tactics. One involves adding an authentication image to all my forms. Since robots can’t read the image and write in the numbers/letters, only humans can use the forms. So this week I’m hunting for a good Captucha script that will do this, and then I’ll have to add that to all my forms on all my sites. Quite a chore!

Yesterday I learned that those same rascals are throwing this stuff at the search engines with hundreds of web pages. Ah, but now they are pulling the lion’s beard; the lions will fight back!