The Weekly Spam Report

I get spam. You, certainly, get spam. It's a fact of life, just like death and the IRS (or your local equivalent). In fact, if you have held an e-mail address for more than a small period of time, it's probably easier to escape the IRS than spam.

I've been on the Internet since 1990, and there is at least one e-mail address that I still have that has been in continuous use since 1994. At this point, there are quite a few addresses that point to one of my mailboxes; I use primarily two mailboxes, one at work and one at home, and each one of them is reachable through more than one address (for historical reasons, mainly). I haven't taken any measures to "hide" my e-mail addresses: I post on the Usenet using my real address, I participate in mailing lists that are archived online, I even show my address in my web pages. As you can imagine, I get lots of spam.

And, let's face it, spam is boring. It's always the same thing: get rich quick, see naked ladies, increase the size of a body part, buy this or that. It's simply not fun. So, I decided to get a little fun out of it. I will start collecting my spam and, once a week, I'll write a little column about the spam I received in the previous days. I don't know what kind of thing I'll write, or how this will work out, but I'll try to have fun while doing it. And I hope you get a little fun from reading it.

Also, on the side of the screen, you'll see a few links related to spam. I'll point you towards spam-fighting tools, tell you about the filters I use to put spam aside, and so on. If you dislike spam as much as I do, this may help you get rid of some of it.

So, without further ado, let's go on with the project.