The other day, I got an e-mail from someone I never heard of, telling me about a film festival I have no interest in attending…in another state that I may never visit. Someone got hold of a list of media-connected e-mail addresses (I suppose) and sent this announcement out to everyone on it. I have a pretty decent spam-filtering mechanism in place but of course, a few get through. That one did and I deleted it without comment.
A lot of other people received it and wrote back to the sender to demand that they be removed from whatever list they're on. Fine — except that the entire list, with the e-mail addresses of all the recipients, was embedded in the header of the message. This means that everyone on the list receives every reply to the original message. So if you got it and you wrote to them to demand they not send you any more junk mail, your message is copied to me. So I am now getting spammed by people who are mad at someone else spamming them.
I used to think spam was just a minor annoyance — and to me, it still is. The company that hosts my e-mail address does a certain amount of spam filtering, and a nice piece of software I use called MailWasher Pro gets rid of anything that's recurring. Oddly enough, the spam I'm now receiving from people who are demanding to be removed from the spam list is the hardest kind to filter out.
But from what I see out on Ye Olde Internet, the problem's getting really acute for some people. Someone's going to do something about it and since so much spam comes from other, ungovernable countries, a legislative solution won't help much. The answer is going to have to be technological…something that will allow you to define the names or domains of those from which you want to receive e-mail. Bill Gates and his people could wipe this problem out in a week, and I don't know why they don't do this.