19 October 1995	I subscribed. cyberNOTHING.org was only about five months old.
23 April 1996	Anger about spam is increasing. cyberNOTHING.org looked like this.
May 1997	CAUCE is formed.
summer 1997	I drive cross-country, moving at last to California. After a week offline, I realize that there's no longer anything of value in news.admin.net-abuse.email; the few important things would be posted to this mailing list.
August 1998	I'm interviewed for The Newshour, get my hair dyed blue, and go to Burning Man for the first time.
March 1999	I've been making lots of friends and developing other hobbies which take up a lot of my time and interest. cyberNOTHING.org hasn't changed all that much.
spring 2000	I start working for the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS).
July 2001	I start working for Microsoft's MSN Hotmail division, and make a prediction (on that mailing list) which has since been quoted back to me.
30 October 2002	The first collations of what we now call reputation.
December 2003	cyberNOTHING.org is finally updated, sorta.
22 April 2004	My viewpoint has shifted from thinking about spam primarily as a rules/policy issue, to thinking about spam as a user-driven issue.
November 2004	I start working for Yahoo!, and continue to refine thoughts about reputation.
28 January 2005	I start dropping obvious hints that maybe I'm not taking that mailing list so seriously anymore.
June 2005	We've been saying a lot of the same stuff for six years on that mailing list, and eventually I realize why.
July 2005	Technologies for sender authentication get serious. cyberNOTHING.org is finally redesigned into more or less what you see today. I buy the best hat I've ever owned.
14 February 2006	My old friend Brian is as angry about spam as it looked like people were becoming ten years earlier.
31 October 2006	Even though I'm still working on anti-spam stuff at Yahoo! and heavily involved with MAAWG, I realize that I'm not a spamfighter anymore -- not like I used to be.
9 December 2006	Brian is dead. I miss him. He's still receiving spam.
February 2007	I travel to Bali to talk about anti-spam-related Best Practices for ISPs at the APRICOT conference. Nobody asks any questions about those practices, or about MAAWG, or about Yahoo!. All they ask about is which blacklist will stop the most spam.

I'll still be working on anti-spam stuff for Yahoo! and with MAAWG and CAUCE for quite some time, but my outlook has changed -- not to despair, for I still think great progress has been made and will be made, and I'll be involved -- but it's well past time to me to let go of the part of myself which self-identified primarily as a spamfighter.

I am a writer and organizer, and work as an anti-spam product manager.