Museum Bids To Save Spam For Posterity

(PRWEB) November 10, 2004

Amidst increasingly dire warnings of the threat spam e-mail poses the internet and with US businesses forecast to spend $10bn a year (http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,117464,00.asp) avoiding unsolicited e-mail, one blogger has established a museum to save spam for posterity.

Located at http://www.spammuseum.blogspot.com, Stephen Newton’s Museum of Spam now has hundreds of exhibits, none of which have been solicited. The museum, which has no curator, uses the Blogger.com weblog service and is fully automated. Any e-mail to stephennewton.mofs@blogger.com is automatically exhibited in the museum as spam. The address was published on Stephen Newton’s diary of sorts at http://www.stephennewton.com and on the museum’s own homepage for spammer bots (the automated programs that scour the web for e-mail addresses) to find.

Within two days of opening the first exhibit arrived. Claiming to be a confidential request from a wealthy African refugee requiring help to get $10.5m out of Senegal, it’s a perfect example of a Nigerian 419 scam e-mail. Scams of all sorts continue to account for the greater proportion of spam on exhibition in the (surprisingly porn free at time of writing) museum.

‘Spam is as much a part of contemporary culture as anything else to emerge online,’ says Stephen Newton. ‘Millions – billions – of messages outnumbering all the legitimate stuff is hurled through cyberspace every day, only to be deleted in anger and frustration. The museum will ensure that should the spammers be defeated, we’ll have a place to go and remind ourselves what the fuss was all about.’

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