This is a subject that gets me very hot under the collar, because I've been on the receiving end of, shall we say, "unwanted attention" from spammers over the years.

I'm sure we've all had spam at some time or another, ranging from fake Rolexes to fake viagra to fake software and porn! porn! porn! galore. I'm beginning to wonder if spammers ever sell anything genuine and legal these days !

The big boys don't make their money in sending spam any more - the biggest profits are made in selling spamming software ("ratware") and mailing lists to smaller spammers.

I've been on the "business end" of several pieces of "ratware", which forge e-mail to make it look like I sent it, and use randomly-generated addresses - so not only do I get lumbered with all the complaints, I drown in bounced e-mail.

I have to pay a premium for high-end mail filtering, just to keep my inbox manageable. If you want to e-mail me, you have to get the thumbs-up from several different anti-virus scanners, SpamAssassin and some home-grown Procmail filtering - all of which happens server-side. If I had to filter up to 5,000 messages a day using an ordinary mail client (that's the peak for bounces I've had to muck out in a day) , it would render e-mail useless to me as a communication tool.

Spammers claim that they're not doing any harm... yeah, and I just saw three pigs flying in formation over my house.

I've seen spammers hammer insecure servers and leave them for dead, just so they can "broadcast" their "business opportunities". Nothing personal, your server just happened to be open and they decided to help themselves - but they'll keep hammering your server until you fix it.

Spammers claim that bulk e-mail "saves trees" by cutting down on paper usage, whilst conveniently forgetting that computers need this thing called "electricity" to work. You may be saving the forests, Mister Spammer, but you're still contributing to entropy and the eventual heat death of the Universe !

While I'm here tearing apart their "clean and green" arguments, let us not forget that hydro-electric power can have a detrimental effect on fish...

Life story of a salmon: Born. Eat. Swim upstream. Spawn. Get sucked into a turbine and mashed to a bloody pulp.

Moving on swiftly from salmon smoothies, they also have the gall to say "It's just like postal junk mail". Sorry, but that excuse doesn't wash either - I've never seen anyone defrauding the post office, or hijacking mail trucks, just to deliver junk snail-mail. Real advertisers TARGET their advertising, they PAY to send out their material, and they don't send it out "postage due".

Spammers are a cowardly bunch, and they don't like it when people take action against them. This was attached to a message I received a while back...

No Reply - We regret that because of destructive, illegal terrorists acts of a group of deranged anti-spammers, we cannot post a valid reply address.

Next time I get a spammer canned, I'll pull on my balaclava and fire my rifle in the air... then wait for those nice young men in their clean white coats to take me back to the hospital !

I've even had anonymous threatening e-mails in the past, labelling me a "deranged anti-commercial terrorist", a "spam-nazi" and a "communist faggot" for this stance. So much for spammers not caring about being caught !

NOTE:

Although I'm dead against spamming, I have no problems with commercial use of the internet - I just wish the spammers would grasp the concept of "ethics". Sadly, they seem to think it has something to with model aeroplanes..