Aargh...spammers

This may not be considered a unique topic, but I was frustrated this week by how much my geeky computer world is affected by junk emailers i.e. spammers.

-- On Web sites I program, I have to come up with special forms for people to email with so that we don't have to expose the email addresses of staff, because they'll get junk mail.

-- I have one email account that has been rendered almost completely useless because it gets too much junk mail. some people still email me at that address, so I miss their emails for long periods of time.

-- google groups makes you type in the letters shown in an image (like lots of sites do) when you're creating your group so that spam-bots don't create a bunch of groups automatically. Well, their image-serving service got hacked or cracked or screwed up somehow, so nobody has been able to make new google groups for a week. Including me.

-- one of my clients is unable to send email to addresses at one of the largest ISP's in town because the ISP thinks that my client's IP address is the same one used by s junk mailer, so they blocked all of our email. So we have to apply to get it unblocked, etc. etc.

I read some stat about what an insane percentage of email and Internet traffic is junk mail. What a crazy waste of time and resources for everyone! Aaaaargh!!!