Fun With Spam

I had a few minutes and felt like writing something completely off the wall. So if you so desire, you can hit the link below and read "Rob's Ultimate Solution for Eliminating Spam". It's purely a joke, so don't take it too seriously.

The following was written by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. It's based on a conversation I had with some friends a long time ago, and a recent email from Rob Ludwick.

WARNING:The Following is a Joke. Do NOT DO THIS! It is merely meant to be funny. Massive Disclaimers, Read at your own risk, I will not be held responsible yada yada yada. Now that we have that out of the way...

Rob's Ultimate Solution for Eliminating Spam

I got spam again this morning. That isn't uncommon actually, but it is still annoying. My email address is in InterNIC somewhere, I occasionally post to Usenet. Slashdot seems to be pretty popular these days, and my email address is pretty much conventional wisdom, not to mention whenever I post a comment, my address is attached to that. Basically, there are a dozen ways any email address harvesting software could get my name, and all of them have.

So I get spam. Just a few a day. Most of them are ok- some idiotic company sends me spam asking me to by their spamming software. Yeah, that'll work. At least I'm not like Kurt. Kurt posted once to a news server in microsoft.com and now he gets spam for warez CDs and mail order brides. But the worst ones are the ones that start out "RE:Yesterday Afternoon" or something. A completely random subject designed to look like real mail. I get hundreds of emails a day, those things fool me. And each time it wastes maybe 10 seconds of my life. Maybe I get 3 spams a day. times 365 days a year. I'm not good at math, but I can figure this one out: 3 Spam * 10 seconds * 365 days / 60 minutes an hour, that's 18 hours. If I made, say $10 an hour, that means that spam costs me $180 a year in wasted time. Heck, if I was actually paid good money, spam would waste even more!

And this doesn't even begin to show the problem multiplied by millions of people. Every router on the net shovels this garbage through wasting everybodys time. It wastes everybodys bandwidth. It costs zillions of dollars.

Now I accept that Spam is part of the Internet. And I accept that until some sort of email micropayment system exists, Spam will continue to represent one out of every hundred emails I receive. I personally believe that it's the right of the spammer to send spam. (Please don't argue with me about this here or now- that isn't the point of this story)

But sometimes these monsters don't include a reply email address:That should be punishable by death.

So I think to myself that what these guys are doing is effectively mail fraud. And that makes me angry. And not providing a return address is definately on the same level of evil as Genocide, Rape, Murder, Kicking Puppies etc So what will I do about it?

I suddenly realize that I run a website. It's fairly popular. We probably have 25,000 people here on a day when the routers aren't overloaded from routing all that spam. And these people have modems. And this obnoxious spam includes a phone number.

So now I'm sure the solution is as obvious to you as it is to me. I post the phone number. Short term, everyone could call once a day. If we can get 1,440 people to each dial once a day (and since many of these things have 800 numbers, the spammer will have to pay for it), well that means every 60 seconds, they would have another phone call to deal with. Sure, it would just be modem static. They would have no choice but to change their phone number.

Software could make the process very efficient. Any time you get spam with an improper header, you could send it to a server (forward it to [e-mail]). The server tracks all the 800 numbers, and everyone runs a special client. Once a day each client asks the server what number it should call.

It just seems that if spammers can waste our time, the least we can do is waste theirs in return.

WARNING:Please Please Please don't do this. At least not here... *smile*