A site that’s been making its rounds: CluelessMailers.org. At first, it may seem to be a regular, if slightly ambitious, anti-spam site cataloging various spammers and ISPs that support them, but then you dig a little deeper and find the Spamdemic Map, an 800k image that would have to be printed out on a 62″ x 41″ piece of paper at 8.8pt type to be readable. The map shows how incredibly interconnected spammers, certain ISPs, and some large corporatations are. The realization I came to: if you make just one little mistake and get yourself on any one of their lists, that’s all it’ll take to work your address through the huge network of spammers. Kind of depressing.
Of course, this also means that if a few major sources and supporters of these spammers were cut off, the flow of spam would be slowed down and become more expensive for the spammers. Once mass e-mail marketing is no longer financially viable, they’ll find another way to annoy us, but our e-mail will start to clear up. I’m hoping that we hit that critical mass sooner or later, where it just becomes such a mess that “they” decide to move on to something else.
Posted in Technology