 syslog
This month's theme as stated on the cover is
spam. You may notice, however, that there's really only one
spam-related article in this issue. It's Hal Pomeranz's article
on the GreetPause feature in Sendmail, which can identify specific,
unwanted email traffic. Hal's article is excellent and definitely
worth reading, but my point is that he wrote it because we received no
spam-related manuscripts in response to our call for papers on the topic.
Why is this? Have systems administrators effectively
"solved" the spam problem, so they're not worried about
it and thus don't have much to say about it anymore? Are users more
educated on the topic, making it less of a problem than in the past? At our
office, I often hear Rikki across the hall saying, how did this make it through the
spam filter? I, meanwhile, do a daily search of my spam folder for
business-related notes that got trapped there. But, that's just a
matter of tweaking, swatting at flies essentially. Maybe there's just
not much new to say about spam, or maybe the topic just hit readers at the
wrong time. I'm curious, though, and would like to hear your
thoughts. Do you need more articles about spam? If not, what do you need?
What problems are you working on right now? What topics will you need to
know about in the future?
What would you like the magazine themes to be for the
year 2007? Send me a list, and I'll give your suggestions full
consideration.
We're planning for next year right now, and as
part of that planning, we will soon mail an editorial survey to a subset of
readers. If you receive a survey, please take the time to fill it out and
return it. Use the survey as a tool to tell us what you like and
don't like about the magazine and what you think would make it
better. The information you provide is invaluable to us in determining how
to make the magazine more useful to you.
But regardless of whether you receive a survey, take a
minute to write and let us know what you'd like to see in the
magazine. Send your suggestions for future coverage to me at: aankerholz@cmp.com.
Or, send a proposal for an article directly to Rikki at: rendsley@cmp.com. We look
forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely yours,
Amber Ankerholz
Editor in Chief
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