One of the problems with running this site is the large number of people who are apparently unable to tell the difference between a site about spam and a spam site. They type the name of a stock spam into Google, get sent to my page about that stock and immediately conclude that they have found the source of the spam. From then, it's only a matter of seconds before they find the 'Mail Spamnation' button, and fire off a demand to be unsubscribed (or, in some cases, a torrent of quasi-legal threats and abuse). Ha! Take that, you spamming bastards!

My first attempt to cut down the volume was to put a link on the contact form that said ... need help unsubscribing. Click here. My reasoning was that maybe their reptilian brains would register the word 'unsubscribe' and they'd let themselves be lured onto a second page, where I put a big message to explain that no, we didn't send them any spam and that this site existed to help people protect themselves against spam.

Didn't work. About half the people just ignored the fake 'unsubscribe' link. Apparently, they ignored that link just as they ignored everything else on the page except the 'Send' button. The other half read the message and then rushed back to the contact page angrier than ever because I'd lied to them. After all, they knew that I was the spammer, because they'd found the page in Google. My denial was obviously an attempt to trick them.

In passing, I'd just say that typing a stock symbol into Google and assuming that whatever comes up as the first or second hit must be the spammer's homepage really isn't too smart. That's a little like searching for "Osama bin Laden" and concluding that Al-Qaeda must be run either by Wikipedia or the FBI. Mind you, who knows? Maybe Jimmy Wales gets daily messages demanding that he stop blowing up buildings in Manhattan. It wouldn't surprise me.

I have a little piece of boilerplate that I send out in these cases. This never, ever produces a response (although it does sometimes produce bounces, because they couldn't type their own email address correctly). Either the recipients are too embarassed to admit that they've displayed all the intelligence of a can of catfood, or they conclude that I am still trying to trick them.

So in a second attempt to stem the flood, I decided to put up a message that they couldn't possibly ignore. Using the delightful mootools, I created a big box that slides down from the top of the screen when they open the contact page and pleads with them to just read what's written on the page before they fire off their 'stop your <bleep> spam' message. The message box is solid brick-red, covers half the page, and won't go away until you click it. Surely that would get the message across.

By now, those of you who have had any experience of dealing with users are laughing mockingly. Of course, it didn't make a blind bit of difference. Once again, they concluded that I was obviously lying, and my attempt to 'trick' them just made them mad. Remember, they knew that I was the spammer, just the same way they knew that Jimmy hijacked all those 757s. God and Google had told them so. My pitiful denials just fuelled the fires of their righteous wrath.

But even among the mouth-breathers who can't read what's there on the page in front of them, there are some whose egregious stupidity is such that they stand head and shoulders — assuming that they have heads and shoulders, and aren't some kind of protozoan — above the rest. Today's winner, possibly a French-Canadian, calls him or herself 'Tabarnac'. 'Tabarnac' looked at the stock page, then clicked every single one of the tabs at the top of the page, visiting the news page, the helpful anti-spam links page, the statistics page with its graph of spam received, and a couple of others. Then he or she looked at the home page, and visited the about page that describes the purpose of the site. And then, he or she clicked a few more tabs, before finally landing up on the contact page — with its big brick-red message box — and sending the following message (complete with mistyped Hotmail address):

STOP YOUR FUCKING SPAM OR DO SOMETING ABOUT IT im not as stupid as you

Any comment I could make would be superfluous.