A Modest Proposal for ScamSpam

I've gotten tired of silently ignoring all the scam e-mail that I get (you know: the letters asking me to smuggle money out of some third world country or enter into a "business" relationship with someone I've never met). I don't see why these cheating bastards should get any access to my time or mailbox for free.

So I've started sending an e-mail back. My e-mail contains a single line:

     Fuck off and die you lying thief.

It doesn't take long to write and it makes me feel better.

Now, here's my suggestion: Let's all do it. I realize that scamspam is a significant percentage of the world's e-mail and I'm talking about doubling that portion. But I think it's worth it for two reasons:

1. It would put the most strain on the e-mail servers that support these spammers. If nothing else, it would provide an incentive to the owners of those servers to either charge the spammers more to to hunt them down and remove them
2. It would bury the responses from the people who are falling for these scams under a mountain of spurious responses. These scammers would have to find some way to sift the wheat from the chaff this initiative would create. People would have to use a different response than I've used to make the filtering process more complicated.

 What I like about these reasons is that it would create some additional costs for the scammers. And that makes me happy. Let's call it the FOAD initiative for scamspam.

Reading or read

• Palookaville #20 by Seth
• The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists by Seth 
• The Sandman (series) by Neil Gaiman
• Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson
• Miami Blues by Charles Willeford
• Red Bird: Poems by Mary Oliver
• The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
• A Touch of Death by Charles Williams
• The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny
• Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, 1897-1917 by Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Robert W. Snyder, Rebecca Zurier
• New Poems: A Revised Bilingual Edition by Rainer Maria Rilke