I hate spammers. 

These people are the lowest of the low. There should be a national spam offender registry. I'd want to know if one of these dirtbags was moving into my neighborhood.

Every day, I spend a ridiculous amount of time sifting through spam in my home mail accounts and work mail account, and that is after the spam blocking software has had a go at it. (BTW, Norton anti-spam is useless. I finally turned it off after it managed to miss every spam message, but tag every mailing list message and several personal emails. I tried all sorts of configuration options.)

Then, I have to go through the spam in my blog comments every day. I have moderation turned on, so all the spammers are doing is making work for me. None of their messages make it through to the public. Every day I get about 20 comments. When one blog entry gets to be too much of a spam target, I have to turn commenting off. This is unfortunately, as blog comments can be useful.

I also spent a good amount of time implementing two levels of spam blocking in my guestbook. The first is a CAPTCHA image that must be typed in before the entry will be posted. That helps to block the scripted spam. The second is a large set of filters in the stored procedure that tag messages for moderation. This manages to catch most spam entries. The spammers also don't realize that my guestbook is set to nofollow so google isn't going to give them a better ranking based on their junk in my guestbook anyway.

And who on earth takes stock tips from random people on the internet anyway?