Who is Kathryn Plambeck and why do you think I am she?

Not a day goes by but that I do not get spam. Most of it is addressed to "Kathryn Plambeck" at my email address.

I wish I knew who this mystery woman was/is/or will be. But the odds are more she is just a randomly-generated name, established by an email address harvester to lend some validity to his email lists he sells to unsuspecting, even gullible, entrepreneurs.

I don't plan to buy anything from these emails. They even usually have my age, gender, marital status, homeownership status, state of domicile and penis size wrong, even the ones that do not think my name is "Kathryn Plambeck".

The truth is, almost know one buys anything from unsolicited emails, but companies around the world sell their services, packaging harvested addresses, and sometimes even using fraudulent return email addresses to make it seem more likely you'll at least open and read the content.

It doesn't work, but as long as there is a new generation of gullbile souls springing up every few days, anxious to make their millions on the web, as they have been told they will if they just sit through this seminar, buy the software, use this mailing list...there will be victims. Both the buyers of these lists and email and marketing services, the legitimate owners of the email addresses being used for return addresses and then get blacklisted by well-meaning but ridiculously over-zealous anti-spam tool vendors (who also sell products that do not exactly do what they say they are doing), and the sad faced targets who have to delete delete delete this crap every day.

Not to mention with millions, even billions, of these emails going out every day, the bandwidth gets polluted and slowed and the internet as a whole suffers.

But as long as there are gullible people and greedy people, these things will be the craptastic tag-alongs to progress in human communications.

Sigh.