Tuesday, October 2, 2012

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.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This would be great if they actually used a real reply to email address, but MOST don't. You need to click on a link or open a file, or contact them via an email within the body.

Peter Vogel said...

My experience is different. I do get a number of "Follow this link to fix your online account" scams. But I'd say that 80% of the scamspam that I get is of the "reply to this email to get a bazillion dollars" variety.