Alyce Lomax from the Motley Fool (free registration required for this article) has some great commentary on the Pew report we covered earlier. She reminds us that, just because we're getting a little more comfortable with spam, we shouldn't ignore some of the scarier parts of the report - such as, "more than half of people say that spam has undermined their trust of email, and 67% of people say spam makes their online experience 'unpleasant or annoying.'"

ISPs and spam filter makers and email providers shouldn't get "comfy," Lomax says. After all, " Spam continues to be a big, bulky pain, and when it comes to scams like phishing, it's downright dangerous."

And after all, 67% disgruntled customers is better than last year - but it's still an overwhelming majority!

According to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, spam is a little like living in the Pacific Northwest. The more rain you have, the less you mind it.

Although by all accounts spam volumes are exploding, only 67% of survey respondents were bothered by it, compared to 77% a year ago. It's not that it's useful - the same percentage of respondents said they had purchased anything from spam this year as last (around 6%) - it's just that, pundits suggest, we're becoming inured to the annoyance.

After all, spam is actually better than junk mail - it doesn't harm the environment! I'd rather have an inbox full of messages from "Swags T. Gassiest" and "FixMyCreditNow" than a gaudy pile of pizza coupons and "checks" from mortgage refinancing companies to recycle.

After a long and tortured conversation with a Dell representative who barely spoke English, we decided my Inspiron must have a virus, or some nasty spyware aboard. The Dell guy said I should re-install XP. My stomach lurched at the thought. But I had to do something - my computer was getting exceedingly hot, then just shutting itself off. *pszhoooo* and silence. Not great for efficiency.

So I poked around in my task manager. Turns out I had four copies of a process called "dumprep.exe" running, all taking up a considerable amount of CPU time. I know, I know, you shouldn't just go and mess with your processes - but I was desperate. It was this or a total hard-drive scrubdown. One by one, I shut them down. And suddenly, everything was fine.

I've been researching it, a bit, as it's been a few days with no problems. Turns out that dumprep.exe is (or should be) a legitimate Microsoft program, one that runs when a program has a critical error and cannot be restored. It's not integral to your system, so if you should sneak in and shut one down on your computer, it won't be the end of the world.

And - it might very well be some spyware or other software in disguise. As a guest in The ISP Guide forum reports, "although spyware can assume the same name as this Microsoft software (as with any process, spy ware can "mask" itself as a legitimate OS software)."

XP users out there: has anyone else had a similar problem? Did you discover spyware or just reinstall XP?

Damn, and Microsoft made me feel like I was such a special customer…hah! Not. In order (they say) to thwart hackers, who might find vulnerabilities in the test versions of the patches, Microsoft is issuing security patches it's developed for many of its software packages to the Air Force a month before they're released to the public.

The Department of Homeland Security will let the other government agencies in on "new" vulnerabilities that exists and, once the Air Force is finished testing, will distribute them to the rest of the governmental computers.

Who knew that the Air Force were the computer whizzes of the U.S. government? I thought for sure it would be the CIA. Or is the DOHS just worried that these patches aren't perfect so it shouldn't expose anyone too important?

According to Canadian research firm Ipsos Reid, those in Canada receive 4,524 spam messages each last year. That's about 49% of their overall emails. The good news? Spam fell as a percentage, and in total, for 2004; down from 68% in 2003.

No telling why Canadians (supposedly) get so many fewer spam emails than the rest of us (at 87% by most estimates). Maybe it's because they already have inexpensive Canadian pharmaceuticals? Just a guess…

Want to learn more about spam? The nice people from Newsday interviewed Shawn Radford, director of the Spam Museum in Austin, Minn. A couple of gems:

1. The name "spam" is from Jay Hormel's original spiced ham product. At a New Year's party at Jay's house, Kenneth Daigneau (actor and brother to a Hormel exec) took the "sp" from "spiced" and the "am" from "ham" to make "spam."

2. There have been 6 billion cans of spam sold worldwide.

3. Spam is made from pork shoulder, water and preservatives. Yum.

Do you think some Broadway website designer is a fan of irony? Evidently the New York Monty Python musical, "Spamalot," has exposed the names, snail mail and email addresses of 31,000 of its keenest fans to the world wide web of spamfinders.

Due to a security hole, all of those who signed up for newsletters from Broadway shows "Spamalot" and "Movin' Out" were listed with their pertinent info on a publically-accessible web page. It would have taken some digging to find it, but we all know that what spammers' spiders do best is dig.

One subscriber whose info was exposed evidently had a Monty Python-esque sense of humor: "Are you sure they didn't do it on purpose?" said Matthew J. H. Baya of Ellsworth, Me. "Talk about guerrilla marketing."

Evidently Tony Blair and his political operatives are not as anti-spam as they would have you believe. An email from the Labour Party (with the "from" line reading "Tony Blair"), addressed "Dear Labour Supporter," was sent to thousands of British recipients, many of whom are from other political parties. And most definitely did not sign up to receive said email.

One recipient? Very anti-Blair Liberal Democrat MP Richard Allan. Whoops.

In my post about "disguising" my email address from spiders by inserting a space between my user name and the "@" symbol, John wondered why it was effective. "Surely anyone competent enough to write a spidering program could also come up with a REGEX to match them," he said.

Well, surely they could. But why go to the trouble when millions of email addresses are out there -without obfuscation - for the taking? Spammers are only as smart as they NEED to be. Until my strategy (or any of the other creatively simply obfuscations out there) becomes widespread, spammers wouldn't bother writing a REGEX around them. Spammers, as I've mentioned before, aren't about to go for ISO certification - they just have to be good enough.

As the makers of beta format videotapes well know, standards are everything. And in the increasingly difficult battle against spammers, it's become an all-out standards war. Security experts and email companies are proposing several different email address verification standards. There's Sender Policy Framework (SPF), "an SMTP extension that rejects messages whose senders' "From" field domain names don't match a list of authorized IP addresses for that domain." Then there is Sender ID Framework (SIDF), which combines SPF with Microsoft's former Caller ID for E-mail proposal. The problem: to work, everyone has to register with the public SPF database. Only a handful of banks and other phish-worthy companies have registered.

And then there's Yahoo!'s DomainKey. It uses public key encryption technology - something that's been largely rejected as a solution - and Yahoo! won't give up the fight to squash SPF and SIDF in favor of DomainKey.

Clearly, there won't be a good solution unless everyone can agree on one - and use it. Will we be destined for many more years of "Whac-a-Mole" or will a VHS-style winner emerge?

The Weblogs, Inc. network is growing again with the (wow) 74th blog, Divester. There's nothing about spam on Divester, but you will find everything you ever wanted to know about diving and more. Divester officially launches next week, but, hey, we at the Spam Weblog can't keep our inside info to ourselves.

Well, the U.S. can breathe a big sigh of relief, if reports from email security firm Commtouch are correct. It's no longer the major source of spam worldwide; Europe has taken over in a big way, according to data from February emails.

Thanks to a huge number of spam outbreaks from (surprise!) Western Europe, especially France, Germany, Spain and the U.K, Europe now accounts for 24.7% of total spam. Japan and Korea together account for 24.2, while the U.S. comes in a respectable third at 22.8%.

The companies who facilitate the actual sale of product, however, are largely from China. A whopping 68% of all spam hosting sites are registered in that country. 

Ever fail to receive a reply on an email? Could be that your recipient isn't ignoring you, after all; if they're a Verizon customer, it could be aggressive spam controls. According to email software vendor Sendmail, spam-fighting has "in some cases eroded the reliability of the mail system. Now a lot of mail gets filtered out."

Studies from Ferris Research indicate that an average email user might lose between one message a month and five messages a week, ending up in junk folders or being rejected outright by the provider.

Verizon has been blamed for most of the problems, and the company has even been accused of denying all emails from certain countries, outright (although they've denied these claims). Five Verizon customers in Los Angeles have filed a lawsuit against the company, and a Philadelphia law firm is asking for arbitration to settle its claim that Verizon has caused it to lose potential clients.

There is too much talk about the "villians" of spam, says SpamHaus. The company took time yesterday to give some props to a "hero," Global Crossing. Specifically, SpamHaus noted the excellent job of Global Crossing's Acceptable Use Policy, "designed to secure the company's network by explicitly forbidding spamming activities and removing those who circulate malicious traffic."

Dan Wagner, Global Crossing CIO, graciously accepted the praise, saying "We're committed to deploying and implementing the tools and policies that protect our customers' networks from being hijacked for criminal activities."

A Washington-based special interest group, Americans for Prosperity, sent out an email message to the members of North Carolina's General Assembly. The intent was to garner support for their anti-tax message.

Instead, thanks to internal settings that automatically forwarded the email on to other staff members and assistants, about 450,000 copies of the email were distributed, nearly bringing down the General Assembly's email system.

Thousands of spam emails, it seems, is not the best way to publicize your political message; staffers and members are outraged.