“Bad for the business”

Drudge flags this story by the reference in the lead paragraph to “spam rage,” a phenomenon I think most have us have experienced many times over. I don’t think I have ever felt so sympathetic to a person accused of making terroristic threats.
A Silicon Valley computer programmer has been arrested for threatening to torture and kill employees of the company he blames for bombarding his computer with Web ads promising to enlarge his penis. Isn’t the guy entitled to take the ads personally?
And the guy sent his threats by e-mail with a return address surely indicative of his state of mind. One of the return e-mail addresses he used was [email protected].
And the guy has ‘fessed up. He acknowledged that he had behaved badly but said his computer had been rendered almost unusable for about two months by a barrage of pop-up advertising and e-mail.
By contrast, the object of the guy’s wrath sounds like a liar. He said his firm does not send spam but blamed a rival firm which he said routes much of their unsolicited bulk e-mail through Russia and eastern Europe. He said such firms gave a bad name to the penis enhancement business.
Did the penis enhancement business ever have a good name?
HINDROCKET adds: Yeah, well, that’s easy to say if your nickname is “The Big Trunk.” Personally, I was in a state of paranoia for some time after I started getting 30 or 40 “enhancement” emails a day at the office, along with 40 or 50 Viagra ads. I thought they were on to me, until I found out that all of the partners in my firm get them–someone sold a list, I guess. Now I have to spend the first ten minutes or so of my day deleting this stuff. I think [email protected] should be given a medal rather than prosecuted.
UPDATE: Pastor Don Johnson writes to advise: “I would like to recommend a piece of software that helps with [spam] immensely. It is called Mailwasher, and you can find all about it here: Firetrust.com. With it, you can screen subject headers prior to download and delete all of them before they hit your computer. It is also set up now to automatically detect ‘confirmed’ spam and automatically delete it from your mail server without your ever seeing it. I think they have a ‘try before you buy’ system. I have found it to be very helpful, especially this latest feature. It is of course not perfect, but it helps a good deal. BTW, the developers are Kiwis, I have no connection with the company other than as a satisfied user.”

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