h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A recent news story I saw said that an estimate of spam was that 90% of the spam circulating today was from 180 individual people.

It also said that many spam offers were bogus and were attempts to get real email account lists that could be sold to others.

Do you think the 180 people spend all day selling spam lists to each other?

I welcome the new laws to fight spammers. Lock em all up.

That would be good. I actually read an article by someone who actually tried to look into some of the spam offers. It turns out, that by the time he got the email, the site was usually closed already! Or it had never worked to begin with. Go figure.

So I tried it myself...I tried about 5, and none ever worked. Couldn't even bring up the web page usually.

You should be careful. If you open an email with a picture in it (and we know what the picture will be of) it can be set up that the picture generates a unique server request, that identifies the address the spammer sent to and they then know that your email is a real one.

I'm thinking of upgrading to Yahoo's progressive intelligent anti-spam software.

I was pretty careful. I copied down the IP addresses, then entered them into my browser, which was set on insanely high security.