December 2006 Archives

One of the nice things about having a publicly-visible email address is that you get such interesting mail from such interesting people. There's the Canadian man who periodically sends me huge collections of Word documents in which he describes — among other things — how he is being stalked by Alan Greenspan and Queen Elizabeth of England. There's the man in California who sent me death threats because I had "shut God up in a rock" (don't ask; it's a long story).

Oh no! They're onto me! The anonymous sender of this recent message has it all figured out:

Don't send me any more spam. I don't care what you say, your sending it to get people to visit your site. I am going to the better business bureau with this.

My friend in Mexico doesn't seem to be having much luck selling his Saab, but at least he's been faithful to his promise to only send his spam once ... well, twice ... OK, three times ... oh, what the hell, as often as necessary.

The man from Mexico City who sent spam to advertise a car he's selling has sent another round of spam. Which just proves the point that "solo lo voy a mandar 1 ves" is always a lie.

To judge by four messages that I just received, Screen Name Forum (screennameforum.com) has apparently upset someone. I'm not quite sure what Screen Name Forum is or does, because their site is so broken on all the browsers that I prefer to use and so laden with flashing bouncing ads that I can't be bothered to look at it, but I'd guess that they just canned one of their users and he or she isn't happy about it.

A popular refrain among people who like to pretend that what they do isn't spam is "This isn't spam, because I'm only sending it one time." This piece of flawed thinking may have helped shape the CAN-SPAM Act, which some critics say allows marketers "one free shot" at every mailbox (or more than one, because if the victim doesn't jump through the required hoops to 'opt out' of a particular spam campaign, the marketer gets to go on spamming them). The common fallacy in each case is that 'just one little spam' (like Mr Creosote's one 'wafer-thin mint') can't possibly hurt anyone.

The useful Lifehacker blog has a roundup of tips for dealing with spam that have appeared on the blog recently. Some of their tips, such as one on filtering image spam, are worth reading.