Our Spammers War 3--The Battle is Over

Thanks to our host, Pair.Com, we are no longer getting any bounced undeliverable spam from spammers fraudulently using our email address as their "From" address. At one point in the past week, we were getting 100-200 bounced spam per hour, i.e. thousands of such messages a day in our inbox. If we had been more knowledgeable about Unix or mail server operations in general, we could have ourselves taken the step that Pair.com ultimately did for us. But we aren't and we wonder just how many web site owners really are, especially of those who rely on other firms to host their web sites.

We still receive a few hundred "regular" spam messages a day. That may be the price one pays for listing their email address publicly but it shouldn't be. While most spam messages get filtered to a spam folder by our mail client, we still have to check them over to make sure that we haven't inadvertently filtered out some important business email--it has happened. It is much easier to deal with when filtered but the amount of time it takes to download and check, especially when we are on the road and have limited bandwidth through a hotel telephone, is not insignificant. Why should they be using up so much of our time?

This battle with the spammers is done but it is a hollow victory. The war is not over. Some changes are needed in the email server protocols along with some stricter laws and stronger penalties. We fear that spamming may eventually ruin the internet for all of us. BTW, does anybody ever read spam and actually hire a "lawyer for pennies a day"? Maybe just one of those penny lawyers will take on the class action lawsuit we've been thinking about....