Comment Articles

Invasion of the email-spammers

Peter Judge AnchorDesk

Published: 26 Feb 2002 16:50 GMT

My mother just left AOL. This may surprise you, as nearly everyone else I know has a mother on AOL. In many ways, the service seems ideal for non-geeks who need email to keep in touch with relatives in foreign countries (like my brother) or who spend far too much time online (like me).

She is going to another service, driven away by the levels of spam she encountered and the complications of AOL's system for dealing with it. And also by a strange encounter with pro-gun lobbyists in Chicago.

When the spam started she laughed it off: "Why are they trying to sell me Viagra? I can't use it." But that joke wore thin pretty quickly, and several other spams were not funny at all.

The obvious thing to do at this point was to set up a new screen name (that's AOL-speak for email address). We have no idea how her first screen name became known to spammers, since she does not go into chat rooms and has not posted it in any public areas, but it leaked out somehow -- perhaps through a virus attack which ripped through a friend's address list.

Fortunately, AOL allows you multiple addresses, so we set up a new one and she prepared to use it. However, the very first time she logged in -- before she had even sent any email to anyone -- she found a message urging her to protest against gun controls in Chicago. As a retired teacher living in London, UK, she had no interest in this: the very first email to a new screen name was junk. And it was quickly followed by several in a similar vein.