Many of my clients have been spammed by La Cap­i­tana Re­al Es­tate late­ly. And I mean many. Hun­dred­s.

How­ev­er, they seem to have found a way to spam that work­s. And that suck­s.

They have cre­at­ed a Google Group, added all their vic­tims there, and let google do the dirty work.

What's the prob­lem?

1. Google group mails are not block­­able at SMT­P-lev­el be­­cause their senders con­­tain a sort of hash and the re­­cip­i­ent ad­­dress, and no group name. That's in­­­cred­i­bly stupid in google's part.

2. The mes­sages they send are huge (6MB and up) so spa­­mas­sas­sin can not process them. The SA docs say this will not hap­pen be­­cause of "the eco­nom­ics of spam". Well, it hap­pens when you make google do it!

3. I don't want to go back to the old days of keep­­ing a lo­­cal queue-lev­el ad­­dress black­­list. That's aw­­ful!

I have com­plained to google, I have com­plained to the spam­mer­s, even by phone. They use the stan­dard de­fense of "we are just invit­ing peo­ple". "They can un­sub­scribe if they want to". "This is not spam"

Noone does any­thing.

What's the next step? I can't black­list google group­s!

If you read this blog on the web­site (and you do, be­cause my feed is garbage ;-) you may have no­ticed a goodread­s.­com wid­get on the right.

It's not that my read­ing habits are in­ter­est­ing to any­one, since I have be­come a very shal­low read­er in the last two years or so (a ter­ri­ble, ter­ri­ble in­vo­lu­tion caused by all the free sci­fi ebooks float­ing around), but I love that site. In the past I post­ed some book-re­lat­ed stuff here, but it was al­ways sort of guilty about it, post­ing things my read­ers (few as they are) prob­a­bly don't give a damn about.

With goodread­s, I have a way to vent my shal­low opin­ion about my shal­low read­ings. I need the same thing for movies.

Al­so, it's a much more rea­son­able thing than all that "now lis­ten­ing" idea. Who care what you are lis­ten­ing? It lasts for 3 min­utes! A book is some­thing you have in your head for at least a cou­ple of days! It is so much more mean­ing­ful.