How often do you clean out your overflowing closets? I try to tackle them seasonally. The reason being every hanger gets filled....so any new additions to the wardrobe or shoe rack will not fit if I do not get rid of the old. I do have a hard time letting go however. Even things I haven't worn for years....decades...still hang hoping I will get around to altering the length, width, get rid of the shoulder pads....because the fabric is still so nice.

And so it goes with other parts of life. Recently, I realized I had a Email Spam folder that I had not looked into for months. I know that I really should, but other things always seem more pressing. Well, it finally became necessary to look into that overflowing closet. 

Mostly, it contained what I expected: requests for intimate friendships from women in Russia or Algeria, urgent reply requests for my Irish Sweepstakes winnings or recent inheritance from an as yet unknown uncle in the Ukraine, guarantees of amazing google search rankings, a guy named Rick who really wants to help with all of my CAD drafting needs....you know...the old shoes of the spam closet. But then I discovered something I was not expecting......I found a large number of wonderful comments for recent blog posts languishing lost and unread in the back corner! How had they gotten there?!

I quickly went onto my blog settings to see if they were hidden away there in the comments section. And YES they were there! But they had been marked as SPAM so had not been published. I had not noticed this happening because I was receiving a few comments here and there, but was feeling a little lonely that comments seemed to have declined so much. I chalked it up to everyone's ever increasing busyness....less time to comment on blogs with Facebook and Twitter gaining popularity. I was so relieved to see my blogger friends were indeed commenting, but I just did not know it!

I figured out what happened when I saw the 50 or so comments from a pesky robot called "Progressive Home Advantage". Anyone else run into this irritating Spammer? I had gotten a rash of comments from them and decided to label them as Spam in my email files. When I did this, my email assumed all comments coming through Blogger were Spam....so I was not getting any of them! I realized the only way to clean out the SPAM in the closet properly was to mark comments for the blog as SPAM only in the Comments section  on my Blogger page, not in my email files. With that done, all of the legitimate comments have now been published on katiedid!

So....I thought I should start moderating comments over 14 days old, Problem solved.....but wait....not so fast. I received yet another comment yesterday from Atif Ahmed claiming the hottest news about Sunny Leone who is apparently the world's hottest "star" in a film industry genre that shall not be named.

I am back to comment moderation, my friends. At least for the time being until Spammers stop getting past the SPAM gate on blogger.  I will do my best to be very attentive to comments coming in so they are published right away! But Atif....you will NOT be published!

So, after that rambling explanation, what I really wanted to say was how sorry I am not to have seen your lovely comments for the last couple of months! I will try to respond to any questions and visit you all as well! If any of you have any experience with cleaning out the SPAM closets on your own blogs, please do not hesitate to chime it! It is almost Spring Cleaning time and any advice on a good dusting off is always welcome!

Thanks to all of you who send me comments. You really do add so much to my day! Inspiration, community, and fun! I hope my untidiness will not deter you. I promise to mend my ways.