Mail me. Go home.
You're looking at this page, therefore I shall assume you are familiar at least with the concept of e-mail. "E-mail" meaning "electronic mail," in case you wondered why it's called that. Or maybe you've never wondered; if that's the case, I can promise you that you will either find the rest of this to be pointless statements of the stunningly obvious, too difficult to understand, or an uncomfortable reminder of your own stupidity. And yes, this is a rant, so I can say that.
If you have an e-mail account of your own and you haven't encountered spam yet, that probably means you've never ever done anything with it other than look (without touching) at stuff on the world-wide web (that means websites, yes) and send messages to people you actually know in real life. You don't buy anything online, you don't subscribe to any newsgroups or mailing lists, you don't sign any guestbooks on the websites you see (this will become important later on), and you don't otherwise interact with information via your computer. You are either very smart or very dull or terminally lucky. I am none of these things, myself.
See, doing any of those things will lead to spam-- unwanted, unsolicited e-mail advertisments sent to your computer with no encouragement from you. I posted to a newsgroup for a couple of years, and this has lead to my downfall. I got a few messages of the "send one dollar to each person on this list, then add your name to the list and pass it on!" type, and sent their system managers a copy and wallowed in righteous vindication for a few hours when I received notification of the account being terminated. Then they moved on to the "Ah, but now we're selling a program, so that makes pyramid scams okay!" style. I felt vaguely ill, knowing that there was now nothing to stop them. But then I was told I could reply and get off their mailing lists, which I tried. Then came the days when replying to one of these messages simply told the list manager that your e-mail address was an active account, one that someone actually read, and so requesting they remove you was actually harmful. We're now in the days of "automated lists," where you can go to some website and remove your name. I tried that a couple of times, and the websites that claimed to do this seemed to be nothing more than sophisticated smokescreens hiding the confirmation that you read your e-mail at that account. We're also in the beautifully-surreal days of foreign spam that is not just in a language I don't know, but using a character set my computer can't handle. This means that while they are sending me mail I don't want and won't read, at least they're wasting their time by sending it to me-- who couldn't do anything with it even if I wanted to. I find that cold comfort, but like any starving idiot would tell you, cold gruel is better than none at all.
But enough about my troubles. How does this apply to you, my little pretties? Well. Well, well, well, well, well, WELL. Let us assume you're not the sanitised hermit I mentioned envying earlier, the one who gets no spam at all. Let us say you posted to a newsgroup once, asking if anyone knew how to set up Linux on a Mac. (Okay, okay, just go with it.) Just one message. Chances are this message is now saved at that wonderful DejaNews website. I don't know how they do it, but they have archived there ALL of USENET. That is every message ever posted to any newsgroup ever, or so I've been told. (I have no way to check.) Anyone looking for someplace to send their latest spam-a-ganza can go there and spend a few hours writing down e-mail addresses. Or buy a list from someone who's already done this. Of course, you can get programs that will troll for addresses for you, too. One of the less-charming spam types is the one that sells e-mailing lists. That's right-- unwanted e-mail trying to sell you a list of other people to send unwanted e-mail to. Sense? What's that?
But you don't have the first idea how to get to USENET, or what a newsgroup is, and wouldn't know what to do with one if it mailed itself into your inbox and played a little song. (Not many of them do that, so no one else would, either.) Maybe you stick to mailing lists. You probably can see this one coming, though, can't you? It's a MAILING LIST. Unless you know EVERYONE on it, don't kid yourself that no one there is collecting addresses. There's always at least one fool in any group of two or more people, in my experience. You might get lucky and find yourself on the one list of totally honest people left in the world, but I'm not betting bandwidth on it.
That was an easy one, I admit. So let's say you never liked the idea of a mailing list. But you buy things online. That's a bit trickier. It depends who and how and when. The biggest sites will offer you a way to avoid becoming part of a mailing list. If they're nice, they'll put it where you can see it easily, too. Other sites just won't consider the idea of selling a mailing list or collecting one, but unless they say so you may never find out about it. That's tricky. You could write and ask them first, of course. Interesting predicament, that. And of course some sites probably make as much money selling their collected addresses as selling whatever it is they purport to sell. It's a wicked old web, innit.
I admit I have no proof of how nefarious a website can be in that regard. I admit it freely and willingly while I write this and with no complaints waved at me. I'll only say that while it's quite true that I'm paranoid, I find it's also true that whatever nasty thing I can imagine someone might try usually turns out to be a half step short of what they're actually trying. Or the current guys might not, but the next one will. That's how I became paranoid, of course.
But now is my favourite. I truly love this one. This is dedicated to all the websites out there with guest books. You know, some place where you can tell the website owners that they did a good job, you liked their graphics, their FAQ, their content, their hairstyles, or more rarely, their grammar and proofreading. The nice bit about a guest book quite often is when you, as the site owner, get a comment like "that is the single best use of ASCII art I've ever seen" you can look at the top or bottom or wherever of the entry and find the fan's e-mail address and write the weepiest thank-you note they'll ever read. I very nearly had a guest book on my site here. But I wanted to be able to control the guest book myself, and have it on my site. That requires a little more geekery than I'm up to just now, so I held off. Why is that control so important? Because not every guest book out there allows you to hide your e-mail address-- if they collect one-- so that only the site owner has access to it.
Yes, you'd still be taking a chance that the site owner is above board and a gentleman, so to speak. And, quite often, the site owner is. If the site owner sends loads of spam to his guest-book-signers, it is quite simple to load his guest book with unmanageably huge files and other assorted nasty things. And there just aren't that many people out there, or so I like to think, who have a website solely to piss off the people who like it. Possible, yes, but probably not terribly common.
So the particular target for my largest dollop of bile just now is the dissembling, earth-vexing mumble-news who trolls-- actually trolls, mind you, in the purest sense-- the guest books of OTHER PEOPLE-- you heard me-- and collects addresses from THEM. So they mince off with their ill-gotten gains and compose their little spam-packets, shunting them through the ether to your unsuspecting and undefended e-mail box. I'm just getting warmed up, mind you.
Situation: I visit your website. I like your opinion on cotton's place in the home. I write something along those lines in your guest book, and since I have never seen another grandiloquent exhortation in praise of the humble fabric that so moved me and seemed to sum up my entire reason for being, I leave my e-mail address in the hope that you and other right-thinking cotton-fanciers will join me in my ecstasy. Enter Bob-- we'll call him Vern. Vern wants to sell handkerchiefs to the masses, let us say. A perfectly noble call, I might add. But Vern is unscrupled and low and has no friends to show him the true path of the web. Vern sees Altavista, and sees Altavista search. Altavista's search leads him to your site, as it contains information related to his interest in nosewipery. He is selling cotton hankies, yes. Imagine Vern's rump-fed delight on beholding your own guest book, plump with all of the addresses of the cotton-fanciers you've attracted. Vern gets busy with his little cut-and-paste routine, and pretty soon Vern-boy has himself a mailing list like no other.
Well, technically, like one other-- like the list of names on your website.
Meanwhile, I and my little denim-worshipping friends who have visited your website receive oodles and oodles of advertisements about hankerchiefs. I find my tiny little mailbox packed with a welter of missives wanting to introduce me to the splendour of a cotton-enriched nose-wiping experience. Vern might sell one hanky in this, by the way. I wonder how many hankies it'd take to garrote Vern at this point?
Result: I hate your site because it brought me spam. My friends hate your site because it brought them spam. And if you think we won't figure it out (I didn't say "cotton on," so stop wincing), you underestimate the vindictiveness of the spamee. You hate Vern for stealing your addresses and pissing off your public. Vern sells one hanky and is hated and feared by many. No world disaster, and yet it isn't exactly world-peace-enabling, either.
What really gets me is Vern. Vern thinks he's clever, see. He thinks your guest book is there just to help him along. He thinks those addresses, posted as they are on the web for all to see, are his for the taking. "Want, take, have," in the words of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, during her misguided period. Vern Is Not Smart. This is evident in his inability to have his OWN website with his OWN guest book, where he could say "anyone who is interested in cotton hankies, let me know and I'll send you a message as soon as my next shipment comes in!" Vern has pissed off many people, many of whom will never get a chance to tell Vern to his face that he is a pisser-off of many people. Vern is incapable of figuring out for himself that other people are not just there for his convenience. Actually, that's not fair. Vern may be capable, but Vern then chooses not to figure this out. All those in favour of thumping Vern on the base of the skull, raise your hands.
And the real beauty of all this is that I have not been through this situation myself. I'm pleased about that. The only guest books I've ever signed I did safely-- either no address showed on the web, or no address was involved at all. No, I just found out that I work with a Vern. And I don't work with computers, so it took some effort for the subject to come up. I heard about it later, so I can't quote chapter and verse, but is it really possible for someone to be so unutterably stupid as to talk about trolling guest books for addresses to send SPAM, and not know it's wrong? Well, yes, it is possible, because it happened. Dilbert's pointy-haired boss would not fit in among Vern's type, I promise you. He would be bored and he would snigger at the lack of intelligence.
To close this rant, I would like us all to bow our heads and mumble a few choice oaths. If you come up with anything really good, let me know. I've worn all of mine out and need a new one.