Nah, not really. I got a spam mail the other day that expounded at great length about what a great job their company could do in redesigning my web site in India. At the bottom is this message, with emphasis mine:

Disclaimer: This is an unsolicited correspondence. If you are not interested in this matter, you may delete this message without reading it. Please note that we have not purchased your e-mail address from any commercial sources. We have accessed it through primary research on the internet. In case you prefer not to receive any future business communication from us, kindly reply to this email with the subject `REMOVE’ in the subject line.

That’s right. You don’t have to read the message to know you can delete it. But if you get it again, you can let them know not to ever contact them again — assuming you read the message that you don’t have to read.

But, then again, we all know that responding to spam to ask them to remove your address only verifies to them that your address exists, thus guaranteeing you additional spam mail.

The internet is broken. The only way to fix it is through benevolent dictatorship. I nominate ME to be your benevolent dictator, with the promise that spammers will die. Ok, I might not have the right to kill them, but as Benevolent Intenet Dictator, I reserve the right to permanently blacklist them. That’s a start.

Also, all e-mail with the word “Viagra” in them will be automatically killed at the first available node. (I’m sure Google already has this tech ready to go.)

Any e-mails absent a punctuation mark will be deleted with extreme prejudice.

Any web sites with static backgrounds that the text crawls up and down in front of, will be deleted.

rm -r is my friend.

No monkeys will ever be punched.

Animated GIFs will be banned by my equivalent of the Geneva Convention. I’ll let you have your banner and button ads, but they’re not going to compete for my attention like the side of a NASCAR race car.

If your social networking site doesn’t have enough users to sustain a poll with more than 5 voters, then the DNS will forget you exist.

MySpace.com will not just be deleted — any reference to it will likewise be redacted. This isn’t for the safety of the children. This is for the sanity of good web design.

I thank you all in advance for your support. I promise to share all blackmail moneys taken from large internet companies with a small third world country sponsored by Bill and Melinda Gates. Vote For Me for BID 2006!

(Just noticed this: The NY Times reported over the weekend that porn spam gets better than 5% click through. What’s wrong with you people?)