Spam tsunami drowns guru
By Charles Miller

Some Atención readers who have emailed me in the last few weeks would have received an automated response advising that their email did not get through. The automated response advises them to check the latest issue of Atención for my new email address.

Changing my email address is something I resisted for some time because of the inconvenience to me and others. The problem is that my email address published every week here in Atención is often available on the www.atencionsanmiguel.org website and was subject to being “harvested” by the “bot” (robot) programs spammers use to search the internet for valid email addresses to which they can send their junk email.

I realized this was likely to happen, and for three years the problem of receiving a few unwelcome spam emails was not a big deal. I noted though that with the passing of every month I received more and more unwanted spam. Since I had used the faq@smaguru.com email address only in Atención, I knew full well the source of the spam was that my address had been found there when it was made public.

It is not often anyone can be certain of how their address came to receive spam. Ameritrade was recently sued in federal court by two of their brokerage customers who were receiving unwanted email ads on accounts used only for Ameritrade.

As the months passed, I watched with interest as the numbers of spam emails increased and recently turned into a tidal wave. Some industry experts now say that over 90 percent of all email traffic is unsolicited spam, and my own little experiment certainly seemed to verify this.

Every day I received hot stock tips, offers to sell fake Rolex watches, and discounts at Canadian pharmacies. There were weight-loss programs and potions to increase the size of other body parts, some of which I do not possess. Various Nigerians were offering to make me rich, Russian women were interested in marrying me, I was pre-approved for credit cards or home mortgages. I am a little insulted that someone thinks I need Viagra, especially that much of it.

While I was busy moving my household, I went almost a week without checking this particular email account. When I did, I had 2,623 emails, five of which were legitimate messages from Atención readers. That is 99.8 percent spam!

So, everyone please be advised my email address is no longer faq@smaguru.com, but is now faq7@smaguru.com. This new address made its public debut on September 21, and has not yet received its first unsolicited spam. I intend to watch this and I will report how long it takes the new address to be “harvested” and I think it will be of interest to some readers to keep track of how the spam increases over time.

For a while yet, I am going to let my email software continue sending out those automated responses to let people know the message did not get through to my old address. My sending out thousands of failure notices only adds to the flood of unnecessary email traffic, so this is something I will soon stop doing.

The lesson I hope everyone sees here is that the only effective way to control spam email arriving in your inbox is to not make your email address pubic, and never share it with anyone who will. Furthermore, there is no way to stop spam after you start to receive it, and changing your email address is really the only practical option.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ7@SMAguru.com.