Re: Hey, Tim, had fun on Yahoo! last night. Want to see me and my dirty college chick friends on cam?

That's a pretty good example of the kind of mail I recieve on my Yahoo! mail account about ten times a day. Mind you, I'm not saying that's all the spam I get in the mail - lord no...there's baldness cures, incredible prizes...not to mention good old-fashioned pyramid schemes. Those I don't even mind so much anymore, at least they're straightforward.

The Yahoo! stuff tends to run more towards randy 18 year old girls who - invariably - have webcams and homepages on which to view them and their "wild and crazy" college chums.

A lot of people have been seeing this lately and unfortunately, according to this news article, it's only going to get worse as more and more IM accounts are targeted for this brand of e-mail assault.

I've been pretty lucky over the years, I was careful about giving out my address on forms, etc. Then one day I got lazy. I put my everyday e-mail account on a internet form for some idiotic freebie I can't even remember at this point. Whatever it was, I'm fairly certain I'll never recieve it. Then it happened, almost immediately. The floodgates opened.

Between the spam I get on that address and the stuff I'm getting bombed with on my Yahoo! mail account (which I forward to my Incredimail box) I recieve something on the order of 40-60 bogus mailings a day. As soon as I delete one "fabulous business opportunity" or "medical miracle of science", two more missives appear to take their place.

I propose that all spammers be sent to Cuban incarceration camps, only not the nice, cushy ones like the Taliban are sequestered in - truly horrible ones, where they're beaten incessantly day after day, starved, beaten some more, then shot.

This would serve two purposes: firstly, it would save me the hassle of having to download an e-mail filtering program and learning how to use it and secondly, it would give the long-suffering spam recipients of the world some good, cold justice. Oh, for a spam-free world...

Spammers target IM accounts - Tech News - CNET.com