These people are no longer amusing. I’ve been getting about 10 messages a day from them. On Friday I actually had to add a rule to the server config to detect their domain names, since half of them didn’t score high enough to get labeled as spam. (Bayes training helped, but not enough.) And some of their ads are for really sick stuff – not just garden-variety porn, but fetishes I don’t even want to hear about.

They all have the same structure, the same types of misspellings, the same type of Bayes poison, and point to a website named after food. And while names like “hot carrot soup dot com” and “sexy naked sushi dot com” (I won’t list the exact URLs, since that would only improve their page rank) were funny at first, their persistence has gotten %@*! annoying. Why the heck do they need to send me 10 messages a day advertising what’s clearly one site? And why cluster them?

Mandated opt-out links aren’t enough. Even if spammers weren’t already known to ignore/abuse requests to be removed, it’s obvious that these aren’t complying with other provisions of federal law (fake return addresses, no street address, no “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT” tag on the subject line), so why should anyone assume they’ll honor the unsubscribe links?

The two main email accreditation companies (OK, the only two I know of), Habeas and Bonded Sender, hold their clients to opt-in only criteria. So did California’s stillborn anti-spam law (superseded by federal law the day it was to go into effect). Why couldn’t congress do the same? I do think CAN-SPAM is better than nothing, but it’s done little to stem the tide in the 5 months it’s been active.