Hi Truckster,

Don't ya just love anonymous posters! Also, I'm shocked by your honesty. I think my opinions on spammers are probably quite clear (I want to see you all go bust), so credit to you for popping your head into the lions den and being so open and honest.

Anyway, I get the impression you missed the intended irony in my statement on email spam. Of course people make money by spamming. That's all spam is about. If it didn't make money it would not exist.

Clearly the only way to stop spam is to make it somehow financially un-viable. It would be nice if we could just give the entire planet an IQ boost, I think some more brains would put a pretty big dent in spam proffits, but alas that's but a pipe-dream.

The argument could be made that anti-spam laws are needed and need to be enforced. Opt-out registers for phone spam has been a total God-send. I haven't had a single plonker waste my time on the phone since I put my number on our national don't call list. Unfortunately, don't spam lists are not practical on the net, and even if there were better anti-spam laws, they'd be almost impossible to enforce thanks to the international nature of the net. Just look at how well the MPAA and the RIAA are doing at dealing with illegal file sharing. Laws against spam would just result in me being able to talk about illegal spamming rather than just plain old spamming, but sod all else.

So, again, we come to the conclusion that nothing can be done. Spammers will destroy all popular communications channels. All for a quick buck. I was going to compare spammers to vandals, destroying all around them, but that wouldn't be fair. Vandals destroy stuff for no good reason, spammers do it for cold hard cash. More like drilling for oil in the Alaska National Park than just plain old wanton destruction. Mind you, it's a stretch to compare Twitter to the Alaska National Park, but you get the idea.

I think we'll just have to accept that Ektich is right. The spammers will continue to slash and burn, and we'll just have to keep hopping from technology to technology to keep one step ahead of the greed.

All-in-all rather depressing really. I just hope I didn't teach you programming truckster - I'd hate to be even marginally responsible for your spam.