I know its not a real news source, hopefully you know that too. Now that you DO know that. Read this blurb on The Onion, its funny.

Travis

It’s not the first time, and hopefully it won’t be the last, but it is a big deal to me anyway. Two guys from NJ have been convicted and are being sentenced for sending out millions of spam emails, mostly to AOL users. Its a small step to stopping junk mail but a big step to stopping masked messages. Here is more of the story. Hopefully this will start to put a little more fear in the spammers minds. These two guys got busted by taking a ‘project’ from a government informant.

I don’t like getting junk mail more than anyone else. My web hosting services (I have 5 different ones) do a varying level of good against spam. Gmail is good, Apple’s .mac is great (although I don’t have that address out there anyway), 1&1 internet is ok, HPP was awesome and is decent now, they do provide good support and hosting services. And finally there is Comcast who are average with spam filtering. All that being said, what is it worth to me to get it stopped? I am curious to know the amount of government resources that are going to stopping it. It seems like there are bigger fish to fry than spammers. Spammers are a hassle, but isn’t that also what the delete button is for? As long as I am not charged for bandwidth, it is at most a minute or two a day of deleting and no other cost. I do get occasional complaints from some of the women at my office about the content of the junk messages, I wish there was more I could do for them.

So, lets discuss. How big of an issue is junk/spam to you? Do you think we need the govt. resources going to it, and does it make a difference? Do you have any good or bad email services to recommend or warn against?

-Travis