Linda, this is cool!

[Mindfield]

On Sat, 17 Feb 2001 17:46:47 -0500, "Steve D. Perkins"
<stevedperkins at NOSPAM.hotmail.com> drooled an embarassing wet spot in
his lap as he typed:

>Untitled Document    ARGH!
>
>    I wll never understand why spam still exists, the internet reaching the
>level of development and maturity is has.  I can't imagine that there's
>ANYONE left anymore dumb and/or internet-inexperienced to purchase anything
>advertised through spam.  Even if there is, I don't understand why spammers
>woud target newsgroups for Tcl, Python, and Perl... technologies most often
>used by crusty old-timers LEAST likely of all to be an effective target
>audience...

Blame spambots.  They retrieve all available newsgroups on the
spammer's ISP, then post their crap to every single one of them.
Fortunately many ISPs have gotten wise and have placed posting caps on
duplicate messages, but spambots have found ways to circumvent that --
by placing a random number after the subject line, by rotating the
subject line from a list of subject lines, by placing random ASCII
text at the end of each message, etc. so the server doesn't think it's
a duplicate message.  It's really quite a loathesome little business,
and I've never figured out why people are still stupid enough to think
that it works, but I guess they still abide by the old motto, "There's
no such thing as bad publicity."

Ah, but there is if you lose your ISP for violating their TOS/AUP.
And there are plenty of people -- me, for instance -- who are
perfectly happy to send a nice note to their ISP's abuse department.
:)

-- 

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