Those who know me won't be surprise to find a section here on spam email, as it is the thing I despise whenever I encounter it on what has unfortunately become a regular occurance. It is, to me, electronic sewage. To those who profit from it, it is an important marketing tool. It's so important that I have to receive email in my private account informing me of mortgages in Florida. I have no plans to foolow other members of my family and emigrate. I receive offers for Viagra and Vicodin with which I have two issues. 1) They are illegal in the UK without a perscription from a doctor registered in this country, and 2) I'm a healthy 24 year old. I also receive offers to help me "Loose a bunch of weight fast". Now apart form the fact that the grammar in that sentence is worse than anything I wrote since the age of 10, if I were to loose a significant amount of weight then I would be under-weight.

   Spam is an un-targeted peddeling of wares to an audience that does not wish to receive it. That is one of the reasons why I spend a portion of my time fighting it. The other justification came when reading another personal website from another spam fighter. The page which caught my attention read something along the lines of spam: because my 12 year old daughter doesn't need a 16" penis.

   Much to my annoyance, even with a return rate of 1 person for every 1000 emails sent, spammers can turn a profit. This is because many work on a commission basis, the main costs lies with the consumer and not the spamvertiser, and all the spammer has to pay for is a list of email addresses, a fast connection, and a book to provide them with instructions on how to steal resources from other Internet users. A lot, although not all spammers steal system resources as their personal accounts would be terminated if they used those to spam. They therefore need to relay messages across the Internet to disrupt te trail back to them. You may think that I'm being over-zealous in describing spammers as thieves, but the loss of computer cycles, memory usage, disk storage space, and other quantifiable measures of computer uses are classed as a recognisable loss by the US government. How the British government views the situation is less clear. This does not appear to have prompted any law enforcement agency on either side of the Pond to do anything about the DDOS attacks experienced by the operators of real-time blackhole lists. These are servers which maintain lists of email server being used to send spam, and so a company may use this list to eliminate any and all email originating from servers on the list. Hence the spam doesn't reach it's victims, and the spammer's profit margin drops. While they use the freedom of speech argument to continue pumping sewage through cyberspace, the fact that people have the right to choose what they wish to receive is lost on them, despite courts in the USA recognising this back in 1974, before I was even born.

   I'm not going to spend my time re-iterating information on how to combat spam effectively, as many good guides exist. So I shall simply send them the traffic. Claws and Paws has an excellent guide which is written for the home user to follow. You could be forgiven for assuming that no-one would respond to spam emails based on their titles, although this is sadly not the case. An alternative approach, short of extraditing the spammers to countries whom they spam where there is no freedom of speech law, but a law against spam, is to filter email using realtime black hole lists, and baynesian filters to learn the patterns of spamming and respond accordingly. Thereby creating a unique filter for each individual, based on what lands in their inbox.