Maybe it's just me, maybe I'm anal or something, but I absolutely detest spam. I suppose I should start by telling you my definition of spam :-

90% of the telephone calls that I receive are telesales, I have never bought/subscribed to anything that telesales has offered me. In fact they are so ignorant that I now receive letters and telesales for "Mr Peter Pan" because I decided to take the piss out off one of them! About the same sort of percentage of the letters that come through my door are also adverts, or loan/credit card application forms (quite a few of them are addressed to Mr Pan, I really should find out where he lives :|), these are literaly taken out of the letterbox and put straight in the bin unread (however, I have to wait til the "peasants delivery", which arrives several hours later, to get mail I actually want !)

I'm slightly luckier with my email, although I do get hounded by a displaced Yank called Scott, which kind of waters down the spam ratio, but between the forums I'm a member of and all the email addresses I manage, I still end up with a buch of offers for viagra (I have a girlfriend with abilities :|), or cheaper printer ink (I don't own a printer), or cheap rolexes (I don't even know what year it is, why the hell do I want to know the time ? :|) and other crap like that. I think the most entertaining one was from a company that said they could "improve my websites image with a logo" as they were "experts in my websites area"......... damn shame they never took the time to actually look at my website and see that it was an art gallery and had a perfectly good logo, not to mention the fact that it was coded a damn site better than their own pitiful site (complete with crap logo).

So, the "anal about it" bit, I'm seriously starting to think that I may be. I've not only got a custom anti-spam module running on these blogs, I have, before now, be known to join a buch of porn sites using spammers email addresses (lol, bet they have an interesting time with their inboxes now), and now I've gone to the extent of starting my Spam trap.

The concept is simple, every time I get an email advertising a site selling viagra or rolexes or any other shit that I didn't request, I'm going to visit the site and any email addressess that I find on the site will be added to my spam trap. As most people are aware the people who actually offer these services have programs (called bots or spiders) that trawl the web looking for email addresses to add to their databases. So sooner or later the addresses on the spam trap will get into their system and these people will receive a taste of their own medicine.

Anal huh? I get worse, I've also added a link to the spam trap to all of my forum signatures and to every website that I manage, and I'll also add it to every site I code in the future. I'll also actively seek for people to link to the page just so they find the email addresses easier!.

So, am I anal ? I'd be very interested to hear about your views on what you see as spam and how you feel about it, especially if you're actually in favour of spam !

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