Disclaimer: I do the website for Yarn for Ewe, my most local yarn shop.

That said, I’ve taken great classes and bought great yarn there. (I will buy great yarn no matter where I find it, assuming I have money in my wallet… but you just saw that gorgeous stole I made from the yarns I got at Yarn for Ewe, right? Lovely stuff.)

So… a few days back, I put up the new newsletter for the store, and just now I uploaded the final page: the class schedule for Fall.

Of particular interest is a class Wendy is teaching, Socks Knit from the Middle. She learned this technique which results in a re-soleable sock, from Anna Zilboorg (at the Michigan Fiber Festival in Allegan). The class is held on three Tuesday nights, and I’d have to reorganize my life to take that class, but it’s mighty tempting to try. My only reservation is that it isn’t knit in the round. Purling, ugh! But Wendy is great, and I would love to learn a new technique even if I never used it again. We’ll see.

Well, I woke up this morning and checked my email, and I have over 60 messages saying that an email message sent from purpletree.com has bounced. What a mess.

It seems that some spammer selling medications has sent junk emails using fake sender email addresses ending in my domain, purpletree.com. The body of the email messages has a link to a web page where they sell drugs of all sorts. But when the spammers send email to a list of addresses, many of which are not good, the bounced email reports come to me. The system assumes I need the notice, because I own the purpletree.com domain and it looks like my domain sent the spam.

AOL has now blocked mail coming from purpletree.com (actually my webhost) so if I wanted to send you an email and you use AOL, I can’t use my normal email address. The owner of my webhost has contacted AOL to straighten this out. There is no evidence that her machine was involved at all. It appears that the AOL computer system did an instant banning of our mail rather than looking to see who really sent it. (There are often clues in what are called “headers” of an email message, as to who really sent the message, where it really originated… and their system apparently didn’t look there to verify the details.)

Meanwhile, I may need to switch to using my msen.com address in my email system, so I can send my own mail without getting bounced. All three of my domain names; purpletree.com, LynnH.com, and ColorJoy.com, are handled through the same web hosting company, a company I’ve worked with for many years.

What a hassle. It’s hard to relax on the couch and get well when I expect that my emailbox will overflow with bounced counterfeit emails while I’m gone this weekend to Wheatland. I’m a bit worried that other domains besides AOL will start blocking my email.

Sorry for the downer note, I know so many of you write to me appreciating the upbeat nature of my blog. Today I’m still pretty optimistic and feeling mostly upbeat (I’m having a very nice cup of Indian Assam tea and it’s wonderful… and I got to sleep in this morning), but I now have to deal with the reality of modern life. The joys of owning three domain names come along with some possible hiccups, I guess.

I’ll let you know what happens. May you have a pleasant day devoid of any spam, viruses or unsolicited phone calls.

And tell somebody that you love them, if you get a chance. You won’t regret it.