Student "edition" found at {thoughts dot com slash typed no space out no space loud slash blog}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

This free mail forwarding service that I have been using for almost ten years seems to have been shut down.

How did I know this? Because apparently, all these other services that need registration and an email address nowadays not only need your email to verify your registration, but they also send mail to the address every so often.

So if the address fails to receive mail for an inordinate number of instances, apparently now they have this warning posted on the site that the mail is bouncing and should be checked or changed.

On a side note this may be a consequence now of the need of several sites to propagate themselves by asking for your email password so that they can troll your address book and send notices to your contacts.

I think that's gross misrepresentation, but that's up to the people gullible enough to give their password. I stop this in the bid by not giving my password in the first place. I want email my contacts receive to have come from me personally and not mass delivered by some advertising robot.

Anyway, I would have said I'd give up the ghost on the forwarding address, but then the site is still up.

So it's possible that it's a change in their policy, maybe reflected in a new "terms and conditions" page that I have to agree to anew.

So I logged in at the forwarding site again, something I hardly ever do, despite (or maybe because of) all the precautions they have against fishing with a "ph" such as password hint questions.

But then when I got there I encountered another pet peeve, that of very specific new password requirements.

Why the heck does it have to specifically have to have a minimum number of characters THEN a maximum one?

So that if the password I want exceeds that maximum limit, they won't accept it. Isn't it supposed to be that the more characters a password has, the more difficult it is to crack, which is the point of all these precautions?

Is the database that this site has really so limited that they can only set eight characters per user for the password? Don't they see that that means there are only six quadrillion possible combinations for eight characters?

Isn't it clear just how easily a computer trying to crack a password can go through six quadrillion trials?

Anyway, having tolerated that particular quirk of this site, I checked the email address I have. It should still be working.

And when I logged in again at the site that was giving me the warning about bouncing mail, the warning wasn't there anymore.

Lesson here: sometimes, even if two parts of the world wide net don't sync and raises an alarm, it's possible that it can fix itself (by the people who work behind these sites) after a patient amount of time.

Session 2777 realizes that the virtual world and all its denizens are both adaptive and sticklers to features they like. Class dismissed.