Monday, September 29, 2008

If you meet a spammer, kick him for me

After using the same email address for 10 years, I had to retire it this morning. I had gotten used to getting 100 spam emails a day; Apple's Mail did a pretty good job of identifying most of them. But when I checked my email today, I had more than 22,000 (yes, twenty two thousand!) emails. Looking at the first 100 or so, they all seemed to be bounced spam - some spammer apparently had used my email address as the return email for tens of thousands of spams. My inbox on the mail server still had about 120 MB of unread emails when I deleted the account.

I emailed my new address to friends & family, but probably forgot tons of people who will now have a hard time reaching me. 

So, if you see someone who earns a living with spam, please kick the person for me. Not once, but many, many times. I hope you have a black belt in martial arts so it hurts good. Or perhaps break all his fingers so that he will never be able to type again.