On his web log, inessential.com, Brent Simmons, creator of the absolutely essential news reader NetNewsWire, expresses the frustration we all feel with the endless spam flood: "I am, like, two seconds away from filtering all HTML email to the trash. It's spam something like 99% of the time."
Indeed. Filters: Can't live without 'em but can't quite live with them either.
The other day, I was trolling through my list of subject-based filters for trash-bound email to fix something and was struck by how the list has become this weird stew of quick sex and faster business. Words like "naked," "adult" and the dirtiest spam term: "f***" (as in "free"). The mix winds up being some redhot, reversed magnifying glass view into America 2002.
Like Brent, I also hate tarted-up, bandwidth-hogging HTML-based mail and sometimes want to pin the blame on back-in-the-day Netscape. In its earliest days, when employees there still held group chants of "Netscape, Netscape, everywhere," HTML-email was seized on as a way to tempt non-customers from email programs into the universe of all-in-one browsers. The pitch was "hey little boy, we've got colors! and pictures! " Email's been suffering from that hangover ever since. [Full disclosure: Long after the chants I worked briefly at Netscape. I knew it was a big mistake my very first day, but still took three months to find the exit door on Halloween Day.]
Anyway, if I just filtered out all the HTML mail, it'd trash a lot of spam. But, it'd also trash messages from some newbies, including readers of my Peachpit Press books and friends-relatives just now joining the net (yep, there are still a lot of 'em out there). So until a really smart, automatic email filter comes along, I'll just keep manually building my list of dirty American words: low interest, mortgage, printer cartridge...
11:34:44 AM 
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