Many years ago I had an account with Netcom (costello@netcom.com). I was desperate to get a non-IBM account so I could post my résumé and look for a job (this was when IBM was laying off firing departments at a time in Poughkeepsie and Kingston). Anyone, I got an account with Netcom and actively used it from 1994-2000 or so. It was a basic shell account, which I frequently found useful to have. Sometime around 1999-2000 Mindspring bought the remains of Netcom, and later the same year Earthlink bought Mindspring. The merged companies shut down the shell account access and offered to forward email from netcom.com addresses to Earthlink or Mindspring addresses. Thinking this would be a good idea, I signed up for the free forwarding.

Fast forward several years and billions of spam messages later. Earthlink decides to shut down the mail forwarding, but offers to add the address as another email address on the Earthlink account. I decide to let the address die since it receives 100s of spam emails per day (most of which were thankfully caught by the spaminator.earthlink.net service). So, the big day comes, the address dies, and my spam count goes to zero. Not just under ten, zero. Nada. I went days without getting spam. This bliss was shortlived as I've since started receiving 1-2 spam emails again, but nothing like the volume before.

Earthlink, though, didn't kill off the email address. They set up a separate address on my account and promptly billed me an additional, prorated, monthly charge since I was over my allotment for my account. Even though I killed it the day after they set it up, they're sticking to billing a portion of their $21.95 monthly charge (I normally pay $9.95 since I don't use their dialup at all). It's at most ten bucks but I'm thinking of killing off my Earthlink accounts entirely, my only regret would be losing the spam filter they've installed.