My primary email address has become agonizingly clogged with spam over the last year, so much so that I fear I will have to abandon it forever. I've noticed that it seems to come in waves — both chronologically and subject matter-wise. Oftentimes I will get 5 or 8 pieces of spam in close succession. Also, I will notice a new category of subject line (e.g. "low interest rate mortgages!") which will appear for the first time and then become quite common for some time. If these patterns are in fact real, and not just my brain imposing patterns where there are none, I wonder what possible explanations they are. I've meant to start cataloging the spam I receive (time, subject line, content) to gather some hard evidence to chart the ebb and flow of subject matter in the spam-o-sphere, as it were. Jason over at kottke.org has a funny spam-catalog himself going: What I could be doing right now, according to email received this morning.

I'm rarely in favor of increased Internet regulation, but I'm all for swift and stern punishment of spammers. Unlike cellphone telemarketing, which has been banned because the costs fall primarily on the (unwilling) receiver of the call, the costs of spam are more diffuse across the infrastructure of the Internet, so no single economically-victimized group has been made very vocal. There is increasing talk about what to do about the "spam problem", but no decisive action yet.

One interesting proposal is this recent one which suggests coding email clients to refuse any email that does not contain this haiku in the header:

The haiku is copywritten, thus if spammers included it in their email headers, they would be in violation of US copyright law. Presumably Habeas, the company administering the system, would only prosecute selectively those emailers it believed to be sending spam, not good Internet citizens[1] like you or I.

[1] Speaking of Internet etiquette, learned a funny bit of net.lingo today: when will we emerge from The September That Never Ended???