As most of you know, spam made it yet again into the OTR Digest; while the percentage of spam in the Digest over the years is ridiculously tiny, even one is too many for my taste, and over the last year there have been three. And I’m angry. Not at myself, although there is always a sense of personal failure when spam gets there, but mostly at the spammers who make me spend so bloody much of my time dealing with their crap…it’s turning into a full-time job, and taking up way too much of my time.

For those of you who don’t understand how spam gets to you, let me give you a quick overview. (Feel free to scroll down through some of the log entries I’m placing here…they’re gonna be long.) Spammers are thieves, it’s as simple as that. They use various means, mostly trojan programs installed on your computer without your knowledge, to steal your resources. Your machine becomes part of a “botnet” of hundreds or thousands of machines, each sending spam. Where at one time cracking your computer was done by “crackers” (I’ll explain the difference between a “hacker” and a “cracker” on another day) for the heck of it, it’s now done for a real profit motive, sometimes by criminal organizations.

Anyway, once your machine is part of one of these botnets, it will send spam for as long as it’s connected to the Net, almost always without the user’s knowledge. The software that’s installed includes a mini-mail server, so it comes directly from your machine to the target email server (for the Digest, that’s my server). So what can I do about something like this?
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