Spam and Spyware and the Gun lobby
There is a story here about a Nigerian man who has been busted for sending unsolicited emails and scamming people for butt-loads of money. I'm not sure what the details are, but it sounds like he might actually get some time for his crimes. It would be nice if there were some justice in this area for once.
I deal with spam in a couple of different ways. I only give my primary email to people, never to places, stores or banks. That is how your email ends up on every one's list. I use a temporary hotmail address zhsp00001 at hotmail dot com. That email will change in a couple of months. As soon as I start getting spam on a daily basis. When I need to register on some one-off site I'll go to an online email place and register for an email address just for the one transaction. I usually use hotmail just because they rotate their mails about every sixty days. I know I'm not eating up large quantities of drive space.
Never respond to spam. Logging a complaint or taking your mail off the list just confirms there is a human on the other end. The spammers get more money for your address if you have gone through the trouble of opting-out. Trying to rely on spam blockers doesn't seem to make a bit of difference to in my experience. The spammers spend their entire day figuring out ways to bypass spam blockers. That is what they do, that is all they do.
Governments are trying to make things illegal. That is great, except the worse kind of spam is that from people who wish to rip you off. In most places, ripping people off is already illegal. It is a bit like the gun lobby always says. “enforce the laws that are already on the books.” Remember Columbine High? Some one figured out those kids had directly broken nineteen federal laws. “Do you think the twentieth would have stopped them?” some one at the NRA asked. I've left the subject in the dust.
There is a product called SpyBot. Get it. Use it. It helps with Spyware, not spam, but it is worth getting while I'm on the subject.

Want - Get
Did you ever want something or to say something to the right person or to tell some one something and you knew who to talk too about it but all kinds of politics got in the way and you just can't talk about it because you will make one person angry and probably make another person scared or frustrated and people just make it worse because they tell you to go for it and you know you can't because of the people involved and the friendships that might be stretched?
I do.