SPAMCOP (7 january 2004)
I'm sure you know them ...
Buy vi@gr@ cheaply ... I am mr Akazaba from Nigeria and need a bank account to park hundreds of millions of dollars ... Make your Þéñï§ 4 inches longer ... Megastores of porn ... Borrow money cheap ... Hundreds of willing women waiting to be fùçkèd by you ...
Yes indeed ... spam :((
I remember, the first time was not so bad. I received a message that some girl I'd never heard of wanted to see me. To see me? Who would want to see me? I followed the link. Soon I stumbled upon the notorious megastores of porn stashed safely behind the steel fence of a credit card payment.
After a few years, one message a week had multiplied and spawned hundreds of irritating advertisements.
You can imagine how happy I was to hear that XS4ALL offered spamfilters. You get an alternative account (the spam account), which catches your spam messages. If you care to see them, just open the account and you'll see the disgusting vermin by the hundreds - all the messages coming from known spammers.
But spammers may be disgusting, they are by no way stupid: they open an account at Yahoo or Hotmail, disguise it as Jenny, Patricia or InfoSoft, and start spamming from there.
Recently, I heard it was possible to report such spam to an organization called SpamCop. It was free. But my Gawd, does SpamCop make the reporting unattractive!
Instead of just deleting the spam message, I now have to do the following:
- open the spam message
- click a link to spamcop
- wait for a new window to open
- click in this new window that the message must be sent to SpamCop
- wait until the window closes
- log into your other mail account
- open the mailbox
- scroll the message from SpamCop down to the send-line
- send a report by clicking the send-line
- wait for a window that gives the research report
- click that the message is indeed spam
- close the report window
- delete SpamCop's message in my alternative account
- return to my regular mail account
So reporting ten to twenty spam messages takes about twenty minutes a day. Aren't I doing my best to fight spam, I would say!
I suspect the procedure with SpamCop would be much easier if I paid them thirty dollars a year. But I wonder if it's up to the individual users of email to pay for the global fight against spam?
To be more precise: why would SpamCop charge me, who already invests so much of my time, instead of being subsidized by the Internet service providers that are paid to provide a good mail service?
