This is by Jack Schofield. I thought it was well worth adding a shortened version to the Blog. Right on target! "Once an email address hits the commercial spammers' lists, you can forget about using it for real mail. My original Hotmail inbox receives 200 messages a week. Real mail constitutes less than 1% of the total. I just delete the whole lot, sigh, and get on with my life. I know what ought to be done though. First, invest in spam-blocking software, second, make publishing "raw" e-mail addresses a punishable offence. Third, pressurise the firms that allow spammers to operate, and the people who work for those companies. Fourth, put pressure on politicians, few of whom have a clue about the nature and scale of the problem. It is not going to stop until spamming and spam tools - such as address-cloaking software - are made illegal. If you know any hackers, crackers or Perl script writers, I have a little job for them. All they have to do is write me a Trojan that will reliably bounce junk mail back to its original source and cc: it to all the senior staff at the guilty ISPs plus every member of the relevant parliaments. It is time to make the bastards suffer." Jack Schofield, Computer Editor, The Guardian.