It's early in the morning and I just wake up. I get my breakfast and I figure "what the hell", I'll sign online and check my email messages while I'm eating. Sure enough, whether I'm on the WebTV or on my computer, the message light shines to indicate that I have a lot of email to read.

Let's face it, reading their email is some peoples' most exciting part of their day. This supposedly joyful ritual shouldn't be brought down by the detestable presense of junk email. When your spirit drops to the floor because you find only seven valid emails compared to the twenty that you thought you had, you feel the sick individuals that distribute junk mail (or even better, those who actually write the slop) should all be hanged or executed by firing squad. I'd vote for that.

Spammers are the scum of internet society. Compared to fearful computer hackers and crackers, spammers come in second place to them but are equally just as despised. While a computer cracker can do significant damage to some individual, SOMEWHERE on the Net, spammers annoy and irritate thousands of people EVERYWHERE on the Net. No one is safe from them. If you check your email, you've been a victim.

How does your email addy fall into the hands of these scum? Like the lifeless goonies that they are, Spammers will visit newsgroups, chat rooms, websites, and email lists like WhoWhere? and Yahoo! to snatch your address. The more advanced Spammer uses a tool called a robot (more typically known as a SpamBot). The SpamBot spiders throughout the net, visiting random or target areas, recording every email addy it can find. Afterwards, the Spammer sends junk mail to every harvested email address.

As annoying as these people can be, you can find ways to be a thorn in a Spammer's ass. If you get a Spam message that was sent from Hotmail, then you need to forward that message to abuse@hotmail.com. The same goes for AOL or Prodigy. You'd want to forward the unsolicited mail to abuse@aol.com or abuse@prodigy.net if the mail came from these services.

Another way to get even with Spammers is through technical warfare. Through an ANONYMOUS email address, send them email bombs, viruses, ect. Give them a taste of reality, but never write to them. Spammers are usually equipped with software that reads all their email before them, and any messages that contain the words "suck" or "you bite" are deleted. Of course, some Spammers don't read replies to their business mail at all, and they insist that you visit one of their webpages. Obviously, you couldn't send them an effective mail bomb, then.

Finally, those of you who spend your day on the newsgroups should do the following: If your email address is Janet@aol.com, try signing your address as NOSPAMjanet@aol.com. When a SpamBot records your addy, it will record NOSPAMjanet@aol.com instead of Janet@aol.com, thus recieving the wrong email address. Plus, your friends at the newsgroups can still reach you by removing "NOSPAM" from your address.

. comments or criticisms for the author or . zine .? we're intersted in hearing. not to mention we're interested in getting conversations going on the wwwboard. everything is open to the possibility of something more, get your mind as active as your mouth, or maybe get your mouth as active as your mind.
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