SPAM, A LOT

Spam. I hate it. Everyone hates it. Occasionally spammers get caught. Mostly they just get rich. And keep on spamming.

At my main e-mail address I get 30 to 40 spam messages a day. This is actually a little better than a year ago, when it was closer to 50. I'm not including advertisements from companies I deal with. I'm talking about honest-to-goodness, forged return address spam.

But very little of the spam makes it to my inbox. I set up filters, and send spam, or suspected spam, to separate folders. There I can quickly look at them, make sure there's no non-spam, and delete all the shit in one swell foop. (Originally I had a separate folder for suspect messages, but I realized that just about all of them were spam, too. So now I just send them to the spam folder, marked in a different color so I can give them a little more scrutiny.)

Every time a spam message does make it to my inbox, I write rules that would catch it. Lots of rules. Anything that would distinguish it from something I'd want to read--phrases like "enlarge your penis" or "price per dose, " misspellings (especially of words related to sex or drugs), accent marks in the subject (except for valid French accent marks--I do get some real mail with them), any variant of "mortgage" or "refinance," etc. Lately someone is sending spam from abunchofrandomletters@yahoo.com, so now anything from yahoo.com (that isn't in my override list, of course) is suspect.

I've been doing this for a while now, and I have hundreds of rules. But the spammers keep coming up with new stuff--yesterday I added "got laid" to the subject list ("get laid" has been in there for ages).

It's a challenge.