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It's more than just that time of year

At first I thought it was just Steve and me who were experiencing an increase of the amount of spam hitting all of our email accounts. Not only were we getting the usual run of pathetic Viagra ads, stock emails, get rich quick on eBay scams and guys pretending to be girls from dating sites but we were also getting inundated with vile and disgusting ads for Russian KP sites.

Then I noticed that an affiliate manager for one of our sponsors has been having the same problem. Her solution is to put Spam Arrest in place to try and control the rubbish she receives and I think it's something that we will have to look at soon. In the last hour or so over 400 emails hit one of our accounts and I deleted 398 of those at the server.

Perhaps it's a sign that desperation is setting in with some online marketers but, apart from that vile KP garbage, only a very few of the spam emails have come from anyone promoting adult sponsors. While that's rather surprising it's also good to see that sponsors are taking a serious view of anyone who does spam on their behalf.

Now if only those same sponsors would take the same hard line with those cretins who go around spamming blogs. Just one of my adult blogs is collecting hundreds of spam comments a day and even though not one of those comments ever appears on the blog the lazy fools keep on flooding the blogs with rubbish.

Of course most of that comment spam is automated but even when scripts are used it takes time to set the scripts up and to search for blogs to spam. Think of how much time these people waste and how much they could make if they used that time more effectively.

It's sad really because they pin their hopes on something that is never going to work and when they find that they are failing they try even harder before finally disappearing. Instead of making more money with their blog spam all they do is make more work for those webmasters who are prepared to make real money the legitimate way.

Oh well ... for me that means that today will be taken up moving a couple of my blogs to another blogging platform where I can insert Spam Karma into the equation and never have to see their rubbish again.

If you're blogging and you haven't used Spam Karma before do give it a try. It's a free WordPress plug-in that is very effective.

And for those of you who do like to spam via email then an upgraded version of McAfee Site Advisor might just be about to cause you a few headaches. I'm no big fan of even their basic product because it tends to shoot first and never bother asking questions at any time whenever it sees an adult site but the upgraded version certainly does appeal to me.

You see, the new version - which unfortunately will come at a cost - reviews all URLs in incoming emails and warns users of those URLs that it considers to be dangerous to visit or to be the known landing pages of spammers. And anything that makes life hard for spammers has got to be good in my book.

I'm sorry if you're a spammer and you think I'm being unfair but, like the majority of the people, I don't want what you keep sending me, I never asked for it and I won't miss it or you when you stop sending it and disappear.

Besides, spammers tend to show a high level of desperation in my humble opinion. Making money on the Net is much more interesting and more of a challenge when you take the time to learn the true art of marketing a product and making a pitch that will appeal to every surfer who hits your websites. That's the sort of challenge that keeps so many of us going day after day and makes those dollars that keep rolling into our accounts more special and more enjoyable.

I guess just about everything I've said is just so much hot air really. The people who want to spam are those who don't like too much hard work, they prefer to take what they consider to be the easy way to a comfortable lifestyle so they're not going to listen to whatever I might say.

But then just perhaps life could be about to get a whole lot harder for them. The new version of McAfee Site Advisor might just be the start of more things to come to make their lives harder. And we might be about to see Microsoft and others step up their attacks on spammers too.

Perhaps that's why they seem so desperate to make money now while they still can.