Spam killers
: Dan Gillmor finds a prosecutor’s press release about the arrest of a man who got a tad too upset about spam. He faces up to five years in prison for replying to some spam:
4 responses to “Spam killers”
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Start using a good spam filter. I started using Apple’s Mail, even though I like the format of Outlook better, but where Outlook stopped about half of about 50-75 spams a day, Mail stops 90%. And I have YET to have a false junking of an email I wanted.
There are also things you can do about your own behavior to be less distracted by spam. I know you shouldn’t have to, but you can. Set your program to only collect new email every hour. That way, if you do get 3 spams, you get all 3 at once rather than being bothered 3 times. (Of course, you can also manually check for email at any point, if you’re expecting something.) I find these two changes have really made an enormous rush of spam into a very minor bother. -
I have to admit to a certain sympathy with Mr. Booher. Even if I haven’t seen a popup in years (I use Opera for browsing).
Still, I had a dialup problem for several days which kept me from collecting me e-mail) and ended up wading through enough spam to have filled a semi if it had been on paper. About 50% of said spam was offers to increase the activity or size of an organ that I don’t possess. Sigh. -
I was very upset for a while about spam pop-ups from abuse of the Microsoft ‘Messenger’ System.
The pop-ups themselves were horrible and often pornographically alarming, intrusive, and annoying. They often occurred at the least convenient moments.
What got me even more upset was that whenever I tried to complain about them, it seemed ineffective. And often people did not know what the hell I was talking about.
I finally got rid of them by following Walter Mossberg’s directions for shutting off that system on default. These machines were shipped with that system turned on by default. So you have to throw a binary switch to *off* at default. -
I agree that the continued and increased proliferation of spam will distroy the usefulness of email. We are however dealing with two forces here – the cancer-like spammer willing to trade short term gain for the ultimate death of its host and, among others, the gullible men with short penises who continue to buy the latest enlargement product.
