A pair of anniversaries

I interrupt my series on Backscatter spam to announce two anniversaries of mine.

Today, July 12, is my four-year anniversary of working for Frontbridge, which later became Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services.  I started off as a spam analyst, doing the daily grind of writing spam rules and fixing false positives.  I then moved on to an actual spam analyst where I started digging deeper into spam as well as our solution to fight it, and then I became a Program Manger where I am now responsible for setting our antispam roadmap.

I don't write too many spam rules nowadays.  I don't process false positives very often or take a look at the customer submission abuse inbox.  However, I still get spam in my personal email (that we filter) and submit to our spam team for analysis, and I submit the messages in the correct format so my stuff is a pleasant submission to handle.

My second anniversary to speak of is that this is (close enough to) my two-year anniversary of writing this antispam blog.  When I first proposed the idea of doing a blog, no one on my team was that excited about it but my boss (who has since left) was very positive so I started writing about my thoughts and ideas.

The thing about blogs I notice is that a lot of friends who have them either start them and give up after three to six months, or they post once so infrequently it's not worthwhile visiting them because let's be honest - we all visit blogs in order to read fresh content.

On this blog, for the past two years, creating fresh content has been a success.  I don't post every day, but for the past year I have tried to reach an average of one post every two days.  If you count up the total posts I have done since December 2007, it does average out to a post every two days.

Writing a blog is work; I often suffer from writer's block.  But eventually it passes and I find that I usually have fresh topics to write about.  My favorite are the long series of blog posts that take several days to discuss.  My favorites are the ones on Authentication (which is not done yet, I'm just procrastinating finishing it), Outbound Spam Filtering and now Backscatter.

So the bottom line regarding blogging is this: I like doing it and I have readers so I will continue to do so until I stop enjoying it.