Ugh, spam. I have a “work address” for the comic and another one for Lab Reject Studios stuff that are both separate from my personal email which was long ago compromised by spammers. But sooner or later, they find you. That’s not the really bad part, now. Sure it’s not great to pick out important contacts and convention information from stuff about Dr. Oz’s latest miracle skin cure or hot Asian ladies in my area wanting to talk to me now, but the real problem I’ve been finding within the last year or so is rooted in the solutions. Email forwarding exists as a way to consolidate all these different accounts into one space, right? And that was great, I actually had all the accounts feeding into the abovementioned personal email, which, over the years, had actually started getting less and less spam. Then, unfortunately, it was getting less and less of the good stuff as well. I’ve started having to a direct log-in every few days to the hosts of my other accounts because hey, lo and behold Comic-Con sent me an important notice but it was nixed by a spam filter. You’re supposed to be able to “whitelist” certain addresses and domains but it doesn’t always work — nor does it help if, say, the source address of the important message changes. The spam filter on my personal email account is so stringent that half the time I don’t even get those ‘click to confirm’ messages when I sign up for a message board… and yet even so the occasional viagra crap sneaks through somehow. I can’t even get it to go to a ‘Known Spam’ or ‘Suspect Email’ folder, it just flat out never reaches me, most recently in the case of not notifying me about legitimate comment responses on this very site. Sigh. Anyhow, I’m not sure what the solution would be other than moving to a new personal email platform. I’ve had this one almost 20 years and it’s daunting to try to think all the places I’d have to contact to inform of the change. Also there is one benefit in that since it’s not a Yahoo! or Gmail no one bothers with the hacking that makes Dawn have to reset her passwords or have other security issues constantly. But yeah, if you use multiple accounts from different hosts, be sure you’re checking them at the source from time to time. Sorting through spam you don’t want sucks, but missing something important sucks worst of all.