Spammers rationalize their behavior as simple commerce, but for most of us, they ignore the basic guidelines of polite society. Those of us that were paying attention in class learned that interrupting a conversation is boorish (as in "with tusks, crashing through the forest") and if you monopolize a conversation, you'll soon have an audience of one.

I like to engage in open conversation - but spammers believe open conversation is one-sided. If their comments were REALLY interesting, that would be good. But I REALLY have all the watches I need, and am uncertain about ordering non-prescription vi_A-gre from an international source with no return address. ("Does this have fresh goat extract?"). So I've taken steps to block them.

The spreadsheet shown above is a real-time list of unsuccessful attempts to post a message at http://www.niemannross.com/postoffice . If you go there, you can select a member of my family and send them a message. But you also have to recognize and type in two words supplied by a service called recaptcha . Machines don't know how to do this, and will therefore add a line to the above spreadsheet. (Note: some computers can now recognize these visual puzzles - so you'll see the visual puzzles getting more difficult)

Some interesting notes about the spreadsheet:

• On Sunday, January 24th there is a sudden cessation of activity. That's the day I removed the postoffice link from this webpage. Spambots can't find it anymore, and hey presto, no more spam.


• They used to be a lot more polite, including a saluation ("Hello! I like your thoughts") followed by their own thoughts about cheap watches. Now they just dump their paper bag of flaming feces on your doorstep and run.


• The IP address indicates where the spam came from. The time and date indicate when it came from that address. Given these two pieces of information, an internet provider could track these guys down and give them the boot. But they don't because it's not financially rewarding to do so. As an experiment, I did notify a few internet providers, and the ones that I could actually contact did the right thing. But the job is un-ending, and until I automate the process, I have other things to do.

By the way - if you're not seeing the spreadsheet or links, you can view the original post at http://niemannross.com/nucleus/index.php?blogid=1&itemid=93