I get it every so often: a new system that consumes my attention, mythoughts, and my interest. I find myself thinking about it all the timeand then working on it all the time; it doesn't matter that I'm not atwork, I want to work on it anyways so I do. And I'm impatient to seewhat I've built go into production, to actually get used, to give me feedback .

The current new system enthusiasm is for our new mail

A while back, I thought that a comment spammer had broken my simplescheme to prevent people from fetching the 'addcomments' page once and then using their zombie farm to submit spam, soI decided to switch to a more secure system for this. Since the weaknessin my scheme was spammers being able to replace my hidden informationabout the IP address that originally fetched the 'add comments' pagewith their own, the obvious fix was to sign the IP address using HMAC .

(It turned out that the

Unfortunately, our SMTP frontend died Thursday afternoon, so some ofour usual stats are approximations or partial stats. Having said that,this week we:

• got 11,577 messages from 283 different IP addresses.
• handled 20,711 sessions from 1,929 different IP addresses.
• received at least 317,396 connections from at least 73,000different IP addresses.
• hit a highwater of 38 connections being checked at once.

In