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I Hate Spam!

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I do. Real­ly. It annoys me to get unso­licit­ed com­mer­cial email, large­ly because those send­ing it know per­fect­ly well that most peo­ple do not want to receive it! They har­vest the email address­es of peo­ple (like myself) who would nev­er, ever sign up for their mail­ing lists. They also send out emails to address­es that might or might not be valid on well-known domains (using lists of com­mon names and words), cre­at­ing an unnec­es­sary load on the receiv­ing domains’ incom­ing mail servers. They either refuse to remove address­es from their lists when request­ed, say they’ve removed them but don’t, or remove the name from their list but leave it on lists they then sell to oth­er spam­mers. They go to great lengths to obscure the actu­al ori­gin of their mes­sages because they know that many recip­i­ents will complain. 

This is quite unlike those who send most of the junk mail I receive at my phys­i­cal address, who will stop send­ing it if request­ed to do so — but then, it costs them mon­ey to send out each piece of junk mail. It costs so lit­tle to send out bulk emails that the senders don’t care how many peo­ple don’t want it. I’ve nev­er received a piece of sex­u­al­ly explic­it junk mail, much less had any arrive addressed to one of the kids in our house­hold. Spam­mers hap­pi­ly send porno­graph­ic spam out to chil­dren every day. In short, I think spam­mers are scum who hearti­ly deserve to be per­ma­nent­ly removed from the inter­net and denied access to all the won­der­ful resources it offers. 

Yes, that was a rant. 

My strong feel­ings on this sub­ject led to being stalked by one spam­mer. I still hold those feel­ings and will con­tin­ue to fight unso­licit­ed com­mer­cial emails and inap­pro­pri­ate com­mer­cial posts on Usenet despite that harass­ment. His behav­ior is not, for­tu­nate­ly, typ­i­cal of spam­mers, but oth­er peo­ple have been harassed in var­i­ous ways by spam­mers look­ing for revenge. One of this creep­’s tricks has been to reply to spam he receives using my email address so that I’ll receive mail from that spam­mer in the future (I found out when some of his mes­sages bounced back to me). If some­one starts doing that to you as well, you’ll have a much hard­er time get­ting rid of the spam–but don’t give up! 

This page had grown unrea­son­ably long, so I’ve split it up. 

Last updat­ed 25 Octo­ber 2001

Pho­to by Onlineprint­ers on Unsplash