At the end of last week, I put up a post linking to Tim Berners-Lee post about rebooting of the HTML standards process.

I noticed, through Technorati, a couple of folks linked to my little post as part of their larger discussion of the important decision. 'Hmm,' I thought, as I went outside Saturday to blow the fir needles and the leaves off my driveway for upcoming Trick-or-Treaters, 'I've had a pretty quiet ride in the Blogosphere...' blow-blow-blow, 'I sure hope someone doesn't go and scrape my weakly encoded email address off of my web page and start sending me spam.'

Worse.

Worse than getting 100 spams a day? Someone putting out spam with your return email address + email server and you getting over 100 automated bounce / semi-accusatory spam-scan messages a day. I feel so dirty. Used.

Some dude, somewhere, decided it was worth his time to type in my new email address into the email database and then unleash a spam-bot faking my credentials.

#@%&**! spammers!

I can't wait until sending each email is semi-hard, time-intensive operation, requiring at least a second of computational power. If not more. I send out so few emails that I'd prefer some way of associating meta-data with my domain of "Hey, a hard five-second computation for email originating from ericri.com is just fine."

Hmm. I guess it would be even nicer if somehow all the computation challenges could be part of a larger grand challenge for a hard research problem. If anything - if the spammers keep spamming and sucking up the cost of the computational challenge - it would at least be rewarding to think they are contributing to solving a larger problem and doing some good in the world.