Spam

Introduction

harpy, a predacious person; a spiteful, intractable woman. (After the harpies, three fierce and repulsive monsters with heads of women on winged vulture-like bodies possessing sharp talons. They served as minions of the gods to enact their vengeance upon blasphemers and criminals by tormenting the living and transporting the shades of the dead to their eternal punishment.) Apollonius, Argonautica; Apollodorus, Library I; Hesiod, Theogony; Virgil, Aeneid; Zimmerman.

Definition from Live The Myth Web site.

A harpy is a filthy, disgusting bird (or lots of birds) that tortures people or objects by constantly haranging. Once a harpy finds its prey, it sticks to that prey. Worse, a harpy is so filthy that prolonged contact with it makes its object utterly undersirable to anyone. You certainly wouldn't want to eat anything after a harpy got through with it. Edith Hamilton described it best in Mythology, but I lost my copy, and do not remember the exact text.

The phenomenon of spam is similar to that of a harpy. Ostensibly, once a spammer finds you, he will send you spam until the end of the world. Asking him to remove you from his list may inform him that you are alive, and give him incentive to send you more spam. This is like trying to swat a mosquito. The motion and expended CO2 actually excite it to sting you. With regard to email, I know many people who have abandoned their accounts because of spam overload. I also know people who are paranoid about publicly posting their email addresses for fear of getting onto a spammer's list.

The Problem with Spam

Besides being irritating, spam consumes Internet resources. It fills up disk drives, and uses bandwidth. On my old email account, I get about 50 spams per day, but only get about 2 or 3 real (from people I want to hear from) emails a day. This means that 25x more resources are spent by the email servers on spam than on useful email.

But primarily, spam is a waste of time, no matter how lonely, broke, fat, or small a recipient is. Filtering it out takes many minutes, and, in the process, can cause useful emails to get lost. It also gives people a disincentive to check email.

Anyway, I don't really care to complain about spam, because I am inured to the fact that people have to make a living, or just don't care about other people's privacy. I am interested in studying behavior of spammers.

Goal

For now, I want to figure out if the spammers are responsive to requests to unsubscribing to spam lists. I will collect spam for about a month, and then unsubscribe myself from each of the spams I receive. I will then collect spam for another month, and measure the effectiveness of my actions.

My Email Account

Let me describe my account: it is the one I have used at Georgia Tech since 1997 for all professional and personal email. As far as I know, there are no automatic spam filters in use.

There are many suspects in the search for spammers. With this account, I subscribed to:

This email address is also listed all over the place in the Georgia Tech Web pages.

I started collecting my spam on January 29, 2004.

Suggestions?

If anyone has any suggestions about interesting experiments I can run, please let me know. I'd be happy if anyone gave me cool ideas. However, I'm doing this for fun, so I don't know how much time I could devote.

By the way, does anyone know if there is a way to find out who sold your email address to whom?

Resources

Paying for email? Gates Backs E-Mail Stamp in War on Spam, NY Times, Feb. 2, 2004.