Jinn of Quality and Risk

Before spam existed, I posted messages in Usenet newsgroups, with one of my generic email addresses, and I published several contact addresses for various aspects of my company's Web sites. Little did I suspect. In the following years, these addresses were harvested, and now my mailboxes get spam, hundreds of obnoxious messages every day, including vicious viruses. Sometimes, spammers send out their messages pretending to originate from my domain names, and I get their garbage (bouncing mail). I've considered renouncing email. I've considered junking my domain names.

No. It took me a while to solve the problem. I've set up mail filters, deleted or cloaked email addresses on my Web sites, stayed away from Usenet newsgroups, created private email addresses (for friends and family), and used site-dedicated addresses for online registration (so I know who sells my email address, if/when someone does). Being able to create an infinite number of new, specialized addresses is one of the benefits inherent in owning a domain name.

Last week, I went away for 5 days (Paris for my birthday). Upon re-connecting, I found there were 1384 messages waiting to be downloaded. Only 131 were legitimate messages (the huge majority from specialized mailing lists). 34 spam messages escaped my filters. 6 "good" messages were somewhat erroneously treated as spam — but since they were mailing-list bcc'd (i.e. lacking a relevant To: field) it wouldn't have made any personal difference if I had never seen them.

About 90% of the messages reaching my mailboxes are spam. My filters catch 97.3% of them. In that recent sample, almost 5% of legitimate messages were wrongly marked as spam (but they were not personal messages, and I fixed the filters for mailing lists so the false positives should now approach nil). My next step is to set my mail servers to automatically reject attempts to deliver messages that are obviously junk (e.g. sent from spamming domains). I won't know about that garbage, and simply won't care.

A few things still puzzle me: what kind of inhuman people are the spamming idiots? and, worse yet, who are the protoplasmic amoeba who respond to spam and somehow make it a profitable activity? I don't know which is the least contemptible. 

Browser-based user interfaces are inherently limited, and infuriating. It's also known as "the Web." Bob Frankston: If I were paranoid I'd assume there was a conspiracy to assure that the Internet is kept lame. ... Reservation sites are just one example. I have to specify dates by clicking through separate pull down lists for month, day and year. Those boxes themselves are pretty dumb. If I want to be quick I type JJJ to get to July (January, June, July -- the pull downs usually search on the first character) but maybe I'm supposed to type 0000000 to get there (month 01, month 02, month 03, etc.). Or I can type 2{up} to get to 19. Maybe there will be a calendar popup which does it for me once I wait for it to appear and navigate through its buttons.