spam spam spam is starting to get to me

This is going to sound like a right old fashioned rant but have you noticed how many fraudulent emails there are about these days? The spam filters are pretty good at pushing most of it out of sight  but what has got me going this time is how accepting we are of the stuff.

Some one mailed me today to suggest I mailed his secretary to collect the $1.6 million due to me. Soldiers in Iraq ask me to fence gold bullion for them. I get pious messages from widows in Africa who in the name of the Lord plead with me to help them out of a fix and collect a coupla million in recompense.  I know police forces are overstretched and all that but it seems we have got so used to this kind of crap that we just put up with it.  But this kind of fraud is continual and widespread and in the long term must increase our cynicism about the internet - are the only people you can trust friends of friends referred by email or who you have met in the offline world? In 1993 when William Gibson polished off his seminal work Neuromancer which among other things brought the word cyberspace into general usage could he have imagined that before you strapped on your holodeck and disappeared into the matrix you would have to clear your spam filters of the daily crap accumulating there before you had a chance of cracking the ice around a corporate mainframe. Mebbe we should start some tit for tat spamming of West Africa - there have to be a few mugs who'll fall for it......