There has been a lot of discussion recently about the upsurge in spam, especially the increase in image spam. No one seems to have an answer. I think that is because they have not recognized the real source of the problem. The email delivery protocol SMTP was designed to deliver electronic mail in the same way that postal mail is delivered: The sender hands the mail to a service which delivers the message to the inbox of the recipient.

My most recent project is CastSampler.com, a tool for building a personal “mix-tape” style podcast. I tend to listen to one or two episodes from a lot of different shows, so I don’t want to subscribe to the full show feed. Instead, I add the show to my CastSampler list, then I can add only those episodes that I want to my personal feed. I have plenty of work left to do, but the basic features all work now so I would love to get some feedback.

I released HappyDoc version 3.1 this morning. The only changes have to do with file headers and correcting an “assignment to None” error that came up when None changed from a builtin to a keyword.