Fighting Spam « Life…, and technology

Fighting Spam

I've helped in the war against spam since 1997; i offer free and professional spammer hunting services.

Last Updated: Dec. 2010 — I started spam fighting in 1997 when a spammer sent out a bucket load of spam forged to appear to be coming from my email address. Imagine opening up your email Inbox one morning to see it full of thousands of bounced messages that were forged from you!!! I was ticked! If I had had the legal resources I would have sued the spammer for defamation and fraud (i don’t remember if the spam was sent from within the US or not.)
Anyway, For a few years I spent my spare technical time in learning how to block spammers and retaliate against them. I learned enough to be able to train and advise the Abuse team at a big hosting company that I worked at. I really enjoyed being able to help shut down the free-loading spammers.

Why care about spam? Spam is evil because it is a theft of a service. Good marketers spend the time and money to get people to sign up for their list(s). They don’t mooch off of addresses that they’ve harvested from websites or even worse through viruses that scan your Inbox and Sent folders. (Yes, a lot of the viruses that infect your computers will scan your email folders and send a list of every single email address back to the virus writer/spammer through a secret backdoor.)
It is also a theft of service because it cost shifts the burdens on to the receiving email providers like your local cable or DSL internet provider. They have to pay for bigger hard drives and increased bandwidth. That’s because spam is about 80% of all emails now. That cost is shifted directly onto your monthly bill. Lazy and greedy spammers drive up your monthly bill. It’s dang selfish or ignorant at the least.

So I registered Spamfighter.com in 1998 for about $35. I had hoped to get up an awesome spam fighting resources site there. It never happened and I ended up selling to a big European ISP in 2003 for about $600. I then registered Spamhunters.net.