You know I linger over old things that I should set aside. I have had my Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link account on and off for well over seven years, but for the past three it has not been my primary Internet presence. Lacking the clear self-promotional mission of some of my friends, I had been reluctant to consolidate under a single site, or even, for that matter, a single identity. Towards that end I had established my post-hacker "oppositional" Web site, Zone Libre, in my own old WELL Web space. More recently I had imagined instead leaving there some essential part of myself, though I couldn't determine what that was, and still can't.

What has prompted me to finally push the Web site and the email address over the cliff has been the volume of spam I have been receiving. I am quite fond of the address -- jhs at well.com -- as it is obviously short and sweet. But it is also all over the Web and all over the Google Usenet archives, as well as in a metatag on several thousand Web pages at IDRC.

In the Internet's medieval period, sharing your one true email address meant more contact with the nascent digerati; now it means endless offers for ejaculation pills and Florida timeshares. And by endless, I mean over 50 junk emails a day, double what I was receiving at the account last year, so that the ratio of obviously useless to even vaguely useful is roughly 100 to 1.

Of all the hosts I have dealt with in the past few years, The WELL, sadly, seems the least capable of stemming the flow of spam. So I have been paying for my own filtering at Spamcop.net, and at the current rate the that effort will cost me over $100 a year.

I suppose I should have listened to providence when I travelled to San Francisco at the end of 1999 and visited the old WELL HQ in Sausalito. All the crazed dot.coms that could have interviewed me then, and I ended up at Well Engaged.

So the account goes. Poof. Zone Libre can now be found at the 'Eye. I have left a little something behind, though I don't know if it will survive. We'll see.