If you've just come across this site, you may be wondering why on Earth anyone would bother making a website about spam. Everybody on the Internet - unfortunately - gets spam, and dealing with it is already a time-sink. Why waste more time documenting and analyzing it? This is a good question, so I'll try to explain why this site exists and what it is intended to do.

I've been active on the Internet for quite a few years. When I first started managing my own websites and posting to Usenet newsgroups, spam wasn't such a problem as it is now and I was careless about where I posted my email address. As a result, I started getting spam. And more spam. And then more spam. It was immediately clear to me that spam was a problem that would only get worse.

I added a spam section to my personal website with tips for blocking spam, links to other spam sites, counts of the spam that I was receiving and so on. The idea was to provide information that might help people protect themselves against spam, and make everyone aware of how serious the problem was. As I predicted - and as my statistics showed - what began as a trickle soon became a flood. The email address that I've been using for longest now gets on the order of five hundred pieces of spam today. Taken together with other addresses I use, I get close to a thousand messages a day. Thirty-thousand a month. More than a third of a million a year.

In 2002, I started re-developing my personal site, which is a very large and complex one. I'm rebuilding it pretty much from the ground up, and it soon became obvious that the new version still wasn't going to be ready for release any time soon. But I was eager to make the new and improved spam section available, as I think it contains some information that might be useful. I therefore decided to give that section a website of its own.

Because I manage a mail server that serves a number of domains, I have to keep an eye on spam in order to keep my mail filters updated. Over time, I've developed a number of tools for monitoring the spam stream. Several of the sections of this site are essentially built on the output from those tools. For instance, my tools track stocks advertised by spam. I also keep an eye on domains that seem to be involved in sending spam. I don't bother to track and cross-reference all the snake-oil salesmen pushing diet pills and penis enlargements, the dodgy software dealers or the porn vendors: there are just too many of them. But I do try to highlight some of the operations that might otherwise be mistaken for legitimate businesses.

Spam is evil. Knowledge is power. This site aims to share what I know. I've had enough encouraging messages from people who've found this information useful to make me think that there is some point in doing this. While much of what I know about particular spammers is partial or based on conjecture, my hope is that perhaps something on this site could be the missing piece of a puzzle that someone else is trying to put together, and that it might ultimately lead to some spammer getting the fines or the jail sentence they deserve.

Spammers like to pretend to be poor, misunderstood businessmen, just trying to make an honest buck. Don''t be fooled. They are crooks and lowlifes. Their methods - forging other people's identities, stealing other people's resources, forcing their ads on people who they know don't want to see them - are fundamentally dishonest. It's no accident that most of the products and services advertised by spam are fraudulent - worthless products, 'phishing' and 'get-rich-quick' schemes, illegal software, and so on. Spam and fraud go together like breaking and entering.

Spam is a big, dishonest business. Most spam originates from highly-organized gangs, many of whom are career criminals working in other fields. Their greed and dishonesty hurts people, costs time and money, and threatens to ruin the Internet - one of the most potentially useful and liberating technologies ever invented - for everyone. To me, anything that anyone can do to make life a little harder for them seems worth it.

Finally, you may notice that this site is essentially anonymous. My name doesn't appear on it, and if you look up the WHOIS entry for the domain, you'll see that it's a private registration. This is to give me some limited protection against the malice of spammers. Spammers are generally petty and vindictive, so it's possible that one of them will decide to take action against this site. When they do, I don't expect my anonymity will last long: most spammers are fairly stupid, but sooner or later one of the smart ones will probably work out who I am. It isn't terribly difficult. I can't hope to remain anonymous forever, but I don't see why I should make it easy for them.

I am, however, a real person, and if you write to me I'll probably write back. It may take me a while, as I'm quite busy, but I'll try to respond when I can. If you have suggestions or comments on the site or if you want to ask me a question, feel free to send me a message.

Thanks for reading, and welcome to spamnation.info. I hope it's useful to you.