I met a priest once.
I asked him what it was like living with a collection of nuns.
He said it was like “being nibbled to death by ducks”.
-oOo–
Email Spam is like being nibbled to death by ducks. Except with spam the ducks are anonymous thieves, preying on peoples naivete.
I hardly noticed the first spam nibbles – they were easily handled with the delete key.
But now the nibbling hurts. I spend too much time and money trying to “manage” spam. The world spends too much time trying to manage spam.
-oOo-
Enter Lycos who declared it was “duck shooting season”, gave the ducks 5 minutes to leave town.
They armed the citizens with a metaphoric shotgun – their “make love not spam” screensaver.
Over 100,000 downloaded it.
But the ducks fought back – there was a lotta money at stake after all.
And it now looks like Lycos caved in.
-oOo-
What we need … I think … is an open source improvement on the Lycos software.
1st thought: instead of taking its spammer URL list from a central, privately owned, server, it should integrate into our email clients and/or spam software and quietly follow all links in the emails an individual has marked as spam.
But then, of course, the spammers would just put in my URL www.clarkeching.com into their spam and I’d be screwed for suggesting such a stupid idea.
-oOo-
Any other good ideas, Clarke?
