http://www.snopes.com/

Today there was an acticle on the local news about a gas station owner that was very badly hurt by an email that made it around the world and has caused irreprable harm to his business and reputation AND IT WAS FALSE!

When ever you get email that sounds outrageous it probably is. Go to Snopes.com first when you feel like you want to respond to one of these by "sending it to everyone you know" kind of, well, bulls**t. Emails that do nothing but clog up the internet so that some geek somewhere can get his/her jollies by seeing how far it gets.

Here is a link with some more info on how to avoid getting spammed by bots sniffing for your address. 

http://www.odu.edu/misc/spam/example.htm

And here is a spam blocker application site. The SpamBouncer

 
To see this thumbnail, click on it then hit the back button on your browser to come back to this page.

This is an excerpt from the Minneapolis Star Tribune Sunday paper's "Beakman & Jax" column by Jok Church.

One morning last summer, Beakman and I checked our email, and we had gotten 172 separate pieces of junk email. It took over an hour to download because we use a dial-up modem and not some fancy DSL. So we just shut off our email address.

One enormous problem with that is that we miss you and your emails. 

 We miss real emails from real people and not the spam stuff that wants us to buy ink cartridges, or to change out bodies.

History Of Spam
The first spam was sent by the Digital Equipment Corp. in 1978. It was sent to all western ARPANet addresses to sell a new computer. ARPANet was an early Internet, created by the Army.

In January 1994, a couple of lawyers sent an advertisement to all USENET groups. Then they bragged about it in a book that didn't sell well. 

How They Find You
If your email address is anywhere on a Web page, you get spam. Programs called Web-crawlers scan all Web pages and look for words that include the @ symbol. Those addresses are collected, and you get spammed.

To keep that from happening, change the spelling of your email address [on your Web page]. Instead of "Ryan@blm.net", change it to "RyanNOSPAM@blm...net".  Mention on the Web page that  friends should remove NOSPAM from your address and tell them why. Start a fad!.

Fight Back
Put a link to this URL on your Web page: http://members.hostedscripts.com/antispam.html

This page creates 100 different fake email addresses every time a Web-crawler looks at it. The spam will bounce back to spammers over and over again. It chokes the spammer in his or her own emails. This is a rather delicious idea.

You can also generate anti-crawler code for your page at http://innerpeace.org/escrambler.shtml.

Hating spam has nothing to do with the delicious canned, processed chemically preserved meat product made by the Hormel Co.

The name Spam came from a contest that Hormel had to choose the name. Spam means Spiced ham, for short.

The strange comedy group Monty Python did a skit on their TV show about a restaurant that served every item with Spam.

An unpleasant waitress kept repeating Spam on and on. (This type of comedy is called absurdity [ab-SURD-a-tee].) It was hilarious. A hit.

So the word spam came to mean: words that you get piles of, that don't mean anything, and on top of that are irritating, and a criminal theft of your download time. For short.

Thank you Beakman and Jax!
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