It is my belief that porn spam is the biggest threat to this industry today. Not the Acacia trials, not credit card woes, fraud, over-saturation of the marketplace or even federal criminal cases. No…For the hundredth time today I have cleaned my inbox of all that porn spam. Needless to say, I am sick of it.

It is my belief that porn spam is the biggest threat to this industry today. Not the Acacia trials, not credit card woes, fraud, over-saturation of the marketplace or even federal criminal cases. No… spam will kill us all, eventually.

Why, you ask?

Well, it’s in your face, every day. The copious level of spam seems to increase logarithmically and the tide does not look like it is abating. Spammers don’t care whose mailbox the spam ends up in. Whether it is a church minister’s or a child’s mailbox, they are only interested in numbers – how much e-mail they can send at once.

How this will kill us is simple. It draws attention to an industry struggling to gain legitimacy. For those of us who feel they have already gained legitimacy it is threatening to drag us down… again.

When parents find porn spam in their child’s e-mail, or in their own, it drives them to complain. The more they find, the more they complain. When this tide of complaints reaches a certain level it forces governments to take action. And when governments are forced to take action the result is often draconian ill-considered laws. And those laws will kill off porn.

Spam filters are not the answer because most parents don’t know how to install or correctly configure spam filters. So, either spam gets through or legitimate e-mail does not get through. How many times have you had e-mail returned by a filter? For every one returned perhaps a hundred others are simply trashed.

In the past I have raised this issue on forums only to be knocked down by people saying things like, “Hey, bud! Spam is where I get my income.” What a sorry excuse for a way to run a business. Let’s face it, some of us are in this business for the long term, while others are happy to make a quick buck, and disappear when the heat is applied only to pop up somewhere else with another spam scam.

One trend that sickens me is a trend among the big boys in the industry. They have millions of e-mail addresses under their belts, and this potential wealth is obviously causing them to have second thoughts about honouring the privacy of their members. It seems that when a customer is no longer active they sell off the e-mail address to any spam scam that comes along.

While I won’t name the two biggest culprits which have been responsible for sending me spam lately, I will say these are in the top 1,000 and 100 web sites, respectively (according to Alexa stats).

I often give out a unique e-mail address depending upon the domain of the site that I am submitting my e-mail address to, so the e-mail that I would give out for, say, a site called spamscam.com would be spamscam@myowndomain.com. When spam starts arriving in my e-mail box with this domain name, I know they have sold my e-mail address.

And I have been getting a lot lately. Complaints to these organizations have gone unanswered.

Now is the time to draw the line and decide which side you are on. If you want to stay in business, I suggest you start taking action to reduce the amount of spam you send out. Don’t weaken to the thought of a quick buck by selling off a few thousand or million e-mail addresses. Unless the merchants of porn (us) stop this trade in e-mail addresses and take measures to ensure that they only send “requested” information to their clients, then the really big boys will decide it’s time to placate mom and dad and protect the nation’s children.

And when they do… what will they do?

Postscript: Within hours of submitting this article to the editor of YNOTNews, I started receiving strange bounced e-mails in my inbox.

It turns out my e-mail address was being spoofed (when a person falsifies the return address) by a spammer. One minute I was “Belinda,” the next “Joanne,” but all at my private e-mail address. This attack seemed to originate from a Web site in Hong Kong. As expected, complaints to the postmaster went unheeded.

The timing was incredible. I must have upset the Spamgods!

In the future before writing such an article, I’ll offer up a sacrifice or something.

“The Rebel” has been in the adult industry since 1996 as a programmer and Webmaster, quietly trading his wares. Until recently he has always made a point of keeping his views to himself. Now he feels it’s time to speak out against those who will destroy us… other Adult Webmasters.

His Web site can be viewed at www.rebel-poker.com.