I do. It annoys me to get unso­licited com­mer­cial email, largely because those send­ing it know per­fectly well that most peo­ple do not want to receive it! They go to great lengths to get the email addresses of peo­ple (like myself) who would never, ever sign up on for their mail­ing lists. They also send out email to addresses that might or might not be valid at well-known domains (using lists of com­mon names and words), cre­at­ing an unnec­es­sary load on the receiv­ing domains’ incom­ing mail servers. They either refuse to remove addresses from their lists when requested, say they’ve removed them but don’t, or remove the name from their list but leave it on lists they then sell to other spam­mers. They go to great lengths to obscure the actual ori­gin of their mes­sages because they know that many recip­i­ents will complain.

This is quite unlike those who send most of the junk mail I receive at my phys­i­cal address, who will stop send­ing it if requested to do so—but then, it costs them money to send out each piece of junk mail. It costs so lit­tle to send out bulk email that the senders don’t really care how many peo­ple don’t want it. I’ve never received a piece of sex­u­ally explicit junk mail, much less had one arrive addressed to one of the kids in our house­hold. Spam­mers hap­pily send porno­graphic spam out to chil­dren every day. In short, I think spam­mers are scum who heartily deserve to be per­ma­nently removed from the inter­net and denied access to all the won­der­ful resources it offers.

Yes, that was a rant.

My strong feel­ings on this sub­ject led to being stalked by one spam­mer. I still hold those feel­ings and will con­tinue to fight unso­licited com­mer­cial email and inap­pro­pri­ate com­mer­cial posts in usenet despite that harass­ment. His behav­ior is not, for­tu­nately, typ­i­cal of spam­mers, but other peo­ple have been harassed in var­i­ous ways by spam­mers look­ing for revenge. One of this creep’s tricks has been to reply to spam he receives using my email address, so that I’ll receive mail from that spam­mer in the future (I found out when some of his mes­sages bounced back to me). If some­one starts doing that to you as well, you’ll have a much harder time get­ting rid of the spam–but don’t give up!

In this series, I’ll share what I’ve learned in 15 years of expe­ri­ence online about avoid­ing, report­ing, and fight­ing spam.