SPAM

The email variety, of course.

I hate it.

I don't know where some of these folks are finding me.

Some, I know, are filtering newsgroups looking for anything they can turn into an email address.

Some have no doubt phished address books from friends and family.

Some have even got the phone book from local government Exchange servers - I know this just because of the header info in some of what I get - some emails are copied to folks at a totally different government agency.

I finally had to tell my own mail server not to accept anything from Brazil. Even using blacklists and exclusion lists nd several RBL excluders, I still get a ton of crap every day.

Here at work I get at least three messages a day from Russia. Now, this might be interesting, but it comes in in cyrillics, which I can 'read' but no longer possess the vocabulary to actually understand - so it is frustrating, because while I can make out parts, I can make no sense of it. Worse yet, I get it via a blind copy, and don't want to filter the whole nation just to get rid of these annoyances.

I wish I had a simple answer - there are tools (SpamAssasin to name but one) that will trim this stuff back, hide it, or make it Go Away - but there is always the risk it will deep-six something about which I care, so I tend not to use them all that much, and then to go back and verify their choices - and let the Bayesian filters "learn" some more - but it all takes time.

Now, if I was getting Spam from Germany, I'd at least be able to read it - but I haven't hit any German spam lists yet.

I guess it is time to get yet another email address, and use those that I already have for SPAM sinks. AAARRRRRRRGGGG!