SPAM SANDWICH

I love spam. I love the fact that people care so much about me that they need to ensure I can get valium, viagra, xanax online. And cheaper than anywhere else!

Some people are nothing but heart.

The milk of human kindness knows no bounds. Aren�t they thoughtful and caring and considerate? They want me to ensure that my lover is always happy, that I have no credit card bankruptcy, that I have that CD of secrets the government don�t wanna sell me, and of course, that septic tank.

Because everybody needs a Septic Tank.

I love the way that they try so hard to reach me � as if I don�t know what�s good for me : they trawl the internet, looking for me, just me, and then they find me. And they send me 20,30 messages a day. Because they care so much. They offer me love, and speeddating. And Russian mail order brides. All I could ever want.

Picked out by a crack hit squad of spammers to receive a Russian male order bride I bought on a credit card, the debt from which I handily wiped out with some software I got off an email. She won�t leave me because of that extra three inches I have thanks to the net. And, I�d like to point, she won�t leave me for another, even smaller reason. Green Card. But that�s just detail.

See, email is just the latest thing. People, whomever they are, wherever they are, everybody wants to sell you something. And spammers are just the latest fad : the modern equivalent of door-to-door salesmen, or coldcallers from call centres somewhere in deepest darkest Peru.

Just imagine Paddington Bear with a headset on, being paid 17p an hour and going to classes about what�s happening in EastEnders. Just so he can earn a crust as a call drone. Calls terminate in Peru.

Of course there is a downside of this � if everybody�s job is outsourced to India then pretty soon nobody here will be able to afford to use mobile phones, or banks, or cable television, or luxuries like food. But that�s an entirely different issue.

The important thing to remember is that spam is a virus. A virus that endlessly replicates itself, chokes bandwidth, destroys productivity, wastes time, energy and resources, and has spread like an epidemic over the internet.

Here are some brief calculations : most organisations of over say 50 people employ IT specialists, and the mass spamming of email addresses within that particular company requires constant vigilance, maintenance, updating of virus software, monitoring of incoming emails, and so on and so forth. Conservative estimates are that, for each company with over 50 employees spends on average, �30,000 a year preventing spam and virii. That�s not of course, taking into account the costs of �personal� Spammail � each one of us, clicking and deleting junk mail and Spam from our personal inboxes.

Spammers are paid by the �clickthru� : that is, the number of people who visit the website that is advertised on the email. If only one in 100,000 people clicks on an email, then the Spammer gets a sum of money.

And since it costs a spammer very little to send email (that is, all a spammer needs to do is buy a very big box, a mail server, and possibly � at the very worst case scenario � his own ISP so he can�t get shut down), being a spammer is probably one of the best jobs in the world. You get to flood millions of mailboxes with illiterate rubbish, get paid for sitting on your arse, and only occasionally get arrested or prosecuted for sending unsolicited emails.

FUN FUN FUN

Admit it. It looks like an enormous amount of fun, to be honest. You get to write a programme that harvests email addresses � robots and spiders that trawl the net, email archives, websites, newsgroups, and anything else, and then send millions, billions of people emails. And to conceal your identity, your ultimate crime?

You spoof all the mail header codes so the email looks as if comes from someone else : be they Mark Reed, or Lorraine Crider, or Jackson Baker, or mu.ziq@internet .de or someone, anyone else. And all so Jeremy Douglas (The world�s eight biggest spammer, as if there were a league table of scum), or or or whoever they really are, can flood the internet with semi-legal scams, bogus pharmacies, septic tanks, Paris Hilton videos, or whatever. Because they know if I�m sent an email from some semi-literate stranger offering me a bigger penis, of course I�m going to take it.

And now, we�re getting wise. And they are too. In order to over-ride our spam-blocking software, that is, anything that identifies normal �spam words�. Good old fashioned words like Viagra, because lets face it, all any of us really want is a bit of Viagra isn�t it?

Except it isn�t Viagra we want. We want what the spammers so eloquently call S.0ma X(a)n@x, Vali(u)m, Vi @ gra, Di3t Pills, Many M3ds, czlayukem. I don�t know what that stuff is, but if we�re not careful we�ll soon be talking like this. But not only are they offering us Many M3ds, they�re also offering, an enormous range of other drugs.

That said, if you�re going to order all your Many M3ds from a bogus pharmacy run by a spam robot out of some obscure backwater warehouse then frankly, you�re a fool (or �Ph00L� in spammer speak) and deserve all you can get. Even if they are offering a veritable arsenal of chemicals known as Apidex, Bontril, Didrex, Ionamin, Phentermine, Tenuate, Xenical, Cycliobenzaprine, Flexeril, Propecia, Viagra, Viagra ST, Super Viagre Cialis, Acyclovir, Valtrex, Ultram, Tramadol, Xana, Valium, Prozac, Bupropion HCL, Wellbutrin SK, Ambien, Fiorcet, Buspar. All of which manage to bring up nice red underlines in Micorsoft Word Spellchecker. I don�t know what at least 18 of those things are. But it wouldn�t surprise me if those things were being manufactured by Paddington Bear in a patent-bursting factory somewhere in deepest, darkest Peru.

Personally, I�d never order anything off someone who can�t even put a sentence together. Let alone someone who would send me 136 emails a week on the offchance that I might just order a Septic Tank with Paris Hilton in it, and of course all the V()aGr@ I could take in order to keep that extra three inches, that make her squeal all night, up all night.

THE POETRY OF SPAM

S0 l.3t5 try a p@r@gr@aph in Spa.mmer sp3ak. 1t l00ks 0ddly like the illit3r@te r@mbling5 of a H4ck3r.

Hmm. I love spammers. They�re turning English into gibberish. Soon the world will exist in a state of vowelless perfection. That said, a genuine spam header I received the other day (one of just 136 spam emails I receive a week) was this :

I don�t quite know what it means. But I can guess. I can guess that it meants that somebody wants to sell me something. I�ll put it into my Babelfish and see what comes out. Ah, here we are.

Did you get that by the way? That means that you can now buy Banned CD�s that allow you to (and I quote) : �investigate friends, enemies, track down old flames, lovers, dig up some dirt on your boss for that next promotion, want a fake diploma, need to disappear fast and never look back/? You cant buy freedom at Walmart, you will have the freedom to avoid your Zreditors, judgments, lawsuits, IRS tax collectors, criminal indictments, your greedy ex-wife, or ex-husband, and MUCH more.�

Nice, eh?

I don�t really care about quoting spammers, because I figure they�re not that bothered by ethics. If they were they wouldn�t be selling me this V(I)agr@ stuff. Whatever that is.

But just look at that language. It�s pure poetry. �You can�t buy freedom at Walmart�. That�s almost Chomskian. There you go. It�s easy. I�m making up words myself.

I don�t know what language that is, but it sure as hell ain�t anything any human can speak. Maybe it�s the next evolutionary step : Spamlish.

SPAMADEMIC.

So let us not muck about. Spam is a cancer � an epidemic, a parasite that�s endlessly reproducing over the net, and like any epidemic, eventually it will reproduce so much that the host will die. The Internet will choke to death on spam and rubbish. But before it does that, remember these tragic words, appended to the foot of one of the last emails that I received, mankinds electronic last will and testament -

I don�t know what it means. But it�s pure poetry : the language of heartbreak, desolation, despair in the last chance caf�, grasping wildly for meaning from the meaningless, hope from the hopeless, to carve some kind of beauty out of a world of spam and shit.

Sorry. I�m talking a load of shit. Or, if you�re a spammer, a load of sh()t. If only they could use all this technology to spread beauty and wonder in the world instead of stuffing the net with septic tanks, Russian mail order brides, porn and Vi @ gra. Spam is an epidemic. Time for a kangeroo court � round up the spammers and drown them in their own filth. Because it�s time. Time for beauty and poetry. Time for a restoration of the balance of things. Life can be beautiful. And the fact that wherever man goes he poisons everything.

It haunts my memory still.

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