• Joe Spammer spoofs SPAM e-mail “From” some random e-mail address at mentele.net to jack@some-random-address.com (i don’t know if that really exists, but lets assume it doesnt).
• The e-mail server at some-random-address.com receives the e-mail “From” me.

• Since the mailbox for jack doesn’t exist, the server is most likely set up to bounce the e-mail back to me so I know that “jack” doesn’t exist

So, because this spammer sends this one e-mail, it gets bounced two more times AFTER the spammer originally sent it! Now, multiply that by 500 or so (that is the approximate number of those e-mails that I receive on a daily basis) and we begin to see why SPAM is such a problem. Okay, my 500 is a bad example, but mentele.net is a low-profile system — imagine something like usgs.gov or digg.com or some other LARGE domain with more than 5 users!

SPAM is only becoming a larger problem. We really need some successful legislation against spammers. Hell, we just need to confiscate their servers and computer systems…and give them to me! hehe…well, I’d be happy if we could just do the first part.

———— Update 11/07/06 ————

Odd, the day after I post this, there’s a front page article on Digg titled The Spammers Fight Back talking about a very similar topic (the increased SPAM lately).  Here’s the link directly to the Eweek article.

• All-In-One Gestures – Allows you to browse by using only your mouse (open tabs, go back and forth, etc)
• AdBlock Plus and the Filterset.G Updater – Automatically blocks ads — I rarely see ads any more on any site — and when I do, I block them!
• DownTHEMall! – will let you download all of any type of file on a page — handy for grabbing pictures or movies or whatever else you may want to grab in bulk
• Google Preview – Adds a thumbnail to google searches. Handy for when you know what a page looked like, but not the URL
• ColorZilla – Eyedropper that allows you to choose colors from another website
• MeasureIt – Measures elements on a page
• IETab – Allows you to open those pesky IE-Only pages within an embedded version of Internet Explorer inside one of your tabs
• Nightly Tester Tools – With this, you can install older extensions among other things — It comes in handy when you use firefox betas
• ForecastFox Enhanced – Shows the forecast and a nice map with the current weather — great when it gets closer to the weekend and you want to know how nice it’s going to be!
• Greased Lightbox – This is not an extension per se, but it’s a Greasemonkey script that completely rocks! It allows you to open image links in a preview window so you don’t have to actually navigate away from a page to see an image.
• Customize Google – This allows you to customize the output and functionality of google. I like it because I can force gmail and gcalendar to use https — secure is better! It has many more features than that however, so check it out.

Those are many of my favorite extensions.