I have been pretty darned lucky. Up until five months ago the problem of spam had pretty much passed me by. Think about that, I have had an email address for over 13 years (my first one was a cc:Mail one, before the Interweb almost). And until just this past February or March I had never experienced the wonders of Cialis offers or observations about the size of my penis made by anonymous strangers. I did this by being careful. I had a throwaway hotmail address that I signed up for s**t with. And I had my “real” address that I shared only with friends. In addition, when I had to sign up somewhere with a pop3 address I would create a special vendor@mydomain.com email address just for that occasion. That way if I ever did get spam from a signup then I would know what b*****d was responsible. This worked, for a long time, but not now.
Suddenly in late February I started getting spam, lots of spam. In addition I got a lot of those really annoying bounce messages where some mongrel used my email address or domain as the return address. For a while I tried to fight it. Bayesnian filters. Okipipi Thunderbird extensions. Reporting the mongrels to SpamCop. It was pretty clear to me that someone harvested me from somewhere. I think it’s someone I know in Canada, most of the spam started coming from Canadians. I am guessing that someone got themselves infected with a worm or virus that clipped their mail address book. Bugger. Now my spam is almost entirely out of Korea, China or Brazil meaning I have bugger all chance of ever getting it to stop.
Finally I gave up and just logged onto my mail forwarder and set up black and white filters. I am thinking about just dumping my email address and creating another one. But I don’t want to do that. It means the swine have won. And I like my email address. I have a vanity domain and the address is kind of quirky. Now if someone could only create a mashup of Google Maps, the originating headers of my spam and a Bushmaster .50 cal I would be a happy man.
