Mike Masenick of Techdirt has written up the story of what happened to him when a spammer put his email address in the reply-to field of a piece of pornographic spam, My Short Life as an Unintentional Spammer. I happened to be at a conference with Mike when it happened, and I can attest that it took him quite a while to achieve the state of resignation and desire to look at the issue from an anthropological perspective that he refers to in the article. But out of the experience he has written a very interesting article. For instance, did you know that some people write back to spammers? Highly Recommended.
This kind of thing will happen to more and more people, as spammers become ever more wily in trying to evade spam filters. I don't hold out much hope for legal solutions to the spam problem, given the international nature of the problem. I suspect that eventually we will get to the point where email that isn't signed in some way will automatically be bounced.
Posted by Geodog at February 11, 2003 10:22 PM | TrackBackMy apologies, but my web hoster has turned off commenting, due to a flood of obscene spam bringing the server to its knees. I hope to have this weblog transitioned over to Wordpress in the near future, so that I can have commenting up and working again. Until then, please feel free to send me your comments via my email contact form.. Please ignore everything below this comment.