>I have written an email to Mary S. with Modern Ferret and also the POC
>for the website, but haven't received a response.  Hopefully someone
>here knows.
 
This is actually two issues.
 
1. We receive an extreme overdose of unwanted email.  The address
[log in to unmask] receives over 400 emails per day.  On bad virus
days it often tops 1000.  Since my computer is a Pentium II running
Windows 95, this causes it to crash often -- it just can't handle the
overload.
 
It seems that very many ferret owners have virus-infected systems and a
lot of them have either my address ([log in to unmask]) or Mary's
address in their system.  This is partially responsible for the overload.
 
Also our addresses have been in use for almost a decade now and have been
posted on many web sites which spammers scan to pick up addresses.  My
email address was posted on a Japanese site and I now receive 50 or more
emails per day advertising (I presume) Japanese stuff.  These emails are
all huge graphic files (so that they can display Japanese characters)
which is what seems to really contribute to Eudora coughing up General
Protection Faults on a regular basis.
 
We can't change email addresses at this point -- way too many legitimate
people have these addresses as our contact info.  So we do our best to
try to sift through them.  This makes email processing slow and it is
very easy to accidentally delete an important email within the sea of
crud.
 
The Japanese site I'm referring to (I'm guessing it's Japanese since it's
a .jp domain name -- I can't read it) is currently not displaying, but
you can see an archive of it here:
 
Some of the artwork on the Japanese publications is really pretty.  I
just wish they hadn't put my email address on their web page.
 
http://web.archive.org/web/20030405155133/http://www4.justnet.ne.jp
/~hnagai/ferret_book.htm
 
2. Regarding the ferretshelters.com domain (and a few others).
We started offering these free email services many years ago.  Being able
to afford to maintain these web sites as a public service was much easier
back then.
 
It is going to take us a few days to come up with the money to be able
to afford to renew these domain names.  There's really nothing we can do
about it until we have the money available.
 
All we are able to do for ferrets right now is our T-shirt site, selling
back issues of Modern Ferret & the books we've published, and our free
e-newsletter.  We just sent out a new newsletter and that usually
encourages a few $ in sales of books and such -- at which point we'll
be able to renew the needed domain names.
 
http://www.ferretnews.com/issues/ferret-news-61.html
 
- Eric
[Posted in FML issue 4478]