A while back, I wrote an entry about a bad web spider that at the time appeared to belong toUptilt Inc. About a week after I published the entry, some of thesystem administration folks from Uptilt stumbled across it and got intouch with me to look into the whole situation.

In fact they were pretty puzzled about the incident, because (asthey put it) Uptilt didn't even do outgoing HTTP, much less have aweb crawler; their business is based on email. After I provided

I'm not sure where I ran across this, but until recently I wasn't awarethat you could pre-explode lists and tuples when you declared whatparameters a function takes. That sounds stilted, so I'll give anexample:

def foo(a, (b, c, d)):  print a, b, c, d

This is slightly more compact than the equivalent:

def bar(a, tmp):  b, c, d = tmp  print a, b,

Here's how Hotmail stacks up this week:

• 4 messages accepted; unfortunately, one of them was definitely spamand at least two more probably were.
• 21 messages rejected because they came from non-Hotmail emailaddresses.
• 49 messages sent to our spamtraps.
• 4 messages refused because their sender addresses had already hitour spamtraps.
• 6 messages refused due to their origin IP address, all for beingin the SBL ; four from SBL17935 ,one from SBL27471 ,

In my recent 'give me RSS feeds' entry I wrote in passing '[...] these daysemail is just too much of a hassle'. Which it is. Let me illustrate how.

To subscribe to new mailing lists these days I need to:

1. figure out how to subscribe
2. make up a new email address to give the list
3. go through a multi-stage subscription dance
4. make sure our antispam filters won't eat the list messages
5. adjust my filters to put the messages somewhere distinct
6. remember to check