Ramblings & Musings

This is a crime with a lot of victims. First of all me: despite my powerful filters sending 95-99% of such emails to /dev/null, spam.gz gets around ten per day (none of them goes to mailbox). Looking through spam wastes my time. Sorting these messages out overloads mail system. Using low threshold for defining message a a spam endangers some legitimate albeit spam looking messages. Second, it is me again: my email address gets blacklisted at some servers. This is an identity theft.

Second, Department of Mathematics and University of Toronto: domain becomes suspect in sending spam and messages originated from math.toronto.edu, toronto.edu become suspect in being spam.

Finally, there are all recipients of these spam messages, whose filters did not sort it as a spam. Also those of them, who could get email from me (definitely negligible minority), or from math.toronto.edu, toronto.edu (less negligible minority) but whose mailserver rejected them.

And we are talking only about email spam (and there is bulletin board spam, blog spam, wiki spam, spoofing and fishing). It is difficult to get immediate perpetrators of these crimes (those who actually wrote those viruses and Trojans) unless justice is going after Windiots whose computers got infected.

But there is a common denominator of all these crimes: the accessory always is Windoze and almost always Outlook Express.