March 27, 2008

Sri Lankan Spam

As if all those spam mails about penis enlargement; herbal supplements; deposed dictators, their wives, grandchildren, personal secretaries and grandmothers wanting to give you millions of dollars; and free software downloads weren’t enough, the spamming has started in my own backyard. And that somehow seems to be worse than all those spammy mails from people on the other side of the world 🙂

What’s worse is that the Sri Lankan spammers are so inept that they openly copy the e-mail addresses of all the people they spam. This way, not only do I get spammed, I also know who else got spammed along with me. Yeah, maybe you’ll say "misery loves company" and move on :p But think a moment, if my e-mail address and all those other e-mail addresses are visible to all those who got spammed, what’s to prevent another enterprising person to copy those addresses and spam us all over again? Nothing.

Yeah. Neverending Sri Lankan spam because some idiot, who might be living next door, gathered up all the addresses of people s/he figured out were Sri Lankans. The though of it somehow makes my blood boil even worse than the foreign spam!

So I decided to do something about it – I spammed them all back 😀 OK, that’s not quite right. I wrote to all of those people (taking care not to reveal the addresses again, of course) and told them what the situation was. That our e-mail addresses were exposed to every Tom, Dick, Harry, Jinadasa, Mohideen, or whoever to copy and spam again. I asked that everybody who was spammed contact the spammer and ask him not to spam us again and also wrote to the spammer and asked him to let me know if he got the list from somebody else so that that person can be notified that I really don’t want anymore unsolicited e-mail.

Will anything come out of it? I have no idea. Knowing how things work in Sri Lanka, I might even have retaliation directed at me 🙂 Ah well, you’ve gotta take a stand sometimes, right?

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Posted by Fahim at 9:25 am  |  1 Comment