We Share Your Pain

You may have received some unpleasant or grievously direct junk email with our return address on it. We didn't send it. The junk mailers help themselves to our email address without our permission, probably because it is comparatively eye-catching when it shows up in your inbox. This is called 'spoofing'. They are not hacking our machines and sending the email through here -- this domain is run through a cheapo web-hosting account that doesn't even let us send more than a trivial amount of email.

How Much Email Goes Out Like This

We have no way of knowing. We know it is happening because we get about five hundred bounced emails per day bouncing into our inbox. These promote a remarkable diversity of products, pretty much the typical mix of spam by industry. From this, I infer that spam is not sent by small businesses that actually sell the products that they promote -- it is sent by high-volume intermediaries who distribute it on a grand scale. I'll also guess that the intermediaries are paid per-click for clicks on the web links in the emails, and that they have found that this domain name gives good results when they use it as a return address. But I'm no expert, and I have no way of dealing with this. But the 500 emails make it difficult to use this domain for anything of significance, so we are going to find another path to our spiritual reward.

So it goes.

Last Modified: Sat Feb 05 17:45:17 2005