Spam and the ugly Americans

I’ve had the misfortune to have my email box filling up with spam bounces the last few weeks, due to someone sending out spam and using a domain I control as a return address.

Interestingly, I’m now getting a lot of bounces coming back to me in foreign languages. Occasionally, I’m get spam in foreign languages as well. And it occurs to me just how much spam shows up in foreign mailboxes that can’t even be read by the “intended recipient”.

It’s got to bug the snot out of them. It must come across as the electronic equivalent of some rude tourist coming into their home and shouting at them in a hope that they’ll give them some of that good smelling stuff, and when they can’t make it clear they yell louder, and there’s no way to shut them up because they don’t even share a common tongue, so the loudmouths just keep yammering.

So there’s yet another reason to stop spammers: it hurts our already-hurting image in the world.

Of course, part of me suspects that some people in our government keep spammers out of jail so that they have a new way of sending encoded messages to agents overseas, as part of tradecraft…