You hate spam. Everybody does. And we aren't talking about Hormel's canned meat that tastes great scrambled in with eggs. We're talking email. WAY too much email, over stupid stuff that you don't want anyway. The kind of spam where you get 20-30-40-100 junk emails a day, and end up having to shut down your email account because you simply can't block them all. It's not right, it's annoying, and it shouldn't happen. Trouble is, if you're email address is on the web anywhere, it's very likely that a program called a 'web crawler' will find it and add it to those crummy emailing lists, who tend to share the email with other emailing lists, until you end up spending more time deleting junk email than reading the stuff you care about.
But there's not much you can do about it, right?
Wrong. I recently came across a 'You Can with Beakman and Jax' in the local funnie pages. Now, normally, I don't pay this article much mind, because I was always under the impression that it was geared towards elementary age kids. Guess I was wrong.
The entire article was about spam. The history, how the spammers get thier grubby little hands on your address, and how to fight back. Apparently, Beakman and Jax had to shut down 'thier' email account because they got so much spam. As in, they (ok, thier writer) checked the email one morning, only to find it utterly clogged with 172 seperate pieces of spam.
Go here for the entire article.
Here are the tips that were included in the article for fighting spam:
"Fight Back Put a link to this URL on you Web page: http://www.members.hostedscripts.com/antispam.html . This page creates 100 different fake e-mail addresses every time a Web-crawler looks at it. The spam will bounce back to spammers over and over again. It chokes the spammer on his or her own e-mails. This is a rather delicious idea.
"You can also generate anti-crawler code for you page at http://www.innerpeace.org/escrambler.shtml."
--"You Can with Beakman and Jax" by Jok Church, 1-5-2003.
Incidentally, the website listed on the B&J article is www.bonus.com, and you can email them at [email protected]. Just remove the "NOSPAM" from the address before you email. After thier former experience with having to shut down thier email account, I didn't want to contribute to thier problems by giving web crawlers another chance to get thier hands on the address.
Oh, and that was another tip Jax offered up: adding "NOSPAM" into your email address, and instructing your friends to remove the "NOSPAM" from the address when they use it. Very clever, I must say. :-D
