When you write a blog, you invite with trepidation the comments of your readers and peers who lay waste to what you have written.

In addition to the legitimate comments, you will also receive a somewhat larger number of comments from spammers who seek to scatter links to their own website hither and thither with gay abandon in the desperate, and often futile attempt to drive traffic to their own websites.

Some of the blog spam is obvious as it is little more than a machine generated list of links to websites that cater to those ladies of the night who ply their trade vicariously over the internet.

Some of it is a blatant appeal to the ego of the blog author with comments along the lines of “great writing, love it, will read more” and hope that such praise will result in their comments being published as a hymn to the writers skills.

Personally, even if such a comment wasn’t spam, I’d delete it anyway as being utterly pointless and adding nothing to the website.

The other type is where they craft messages that might be vaguely related to the blog, but are so banal and daft that they tend to stand out.

Today, my collection of spam comments included one of the latter, but one that actually made me do a genuine laugh out loud moment for the unintended folly of the comment.

On a blog posting about the Swan Upping ceremony – something that dates back at least 450 years – was the following question:

“Great idea, but will this work over the long run?”

Accepted, that by the City of London standards, 450 years is a mere teenager in the annals of English traditions, but I do think that it is sufficiently aged for us to conclude that it does indeed work over the long run.

Thank you dear spammer, but even making me laugh wont let your attempt to have a link to a “free usenet trial” appear on my blog.

As one of my hobbies is reading the Early Day Motions in the House of Commons (yes, I am that sad), some of which are serious and some can be quite amusing – I came across this one which was actually quite interesting.

I used to do a little bit of lobbying and still fire off letters to unsuspecting victims to express my views on an issue.

The key thing I was taught when doing letter writing though – is never ever send a “copy/paste” letter to your MP. The MP’s office will get hundreds, if not thousands of identical letters from constituents and will promptly realise that the “concerned voter” is actually an organised campaign by a large organisation.

If I do write a letter, based on an organised campaign I will always state that fact – but then explain why I am personally concerned about the issue and only highlight the research from the organiser which is relevent to my comments.

To his credit, my local MP is quite receptive to these sorts of letters.

I was therefore a bit troubled to read this Early Day Motion this morning:

That this House notes that a campaign by Greenpeace sent around 7,000 largely identical emails to hon. Members who had signed an Early Day Motion about Heathrow; observes that this caused some hon. Members’ mailboxes to become unavailable to constituents who wished to discuss this or other issues or personal problems; further notes that a request to discontinue was not accepted unless hon. Members were willing to commit to vote as the organisation wished; and believes that denial of email service by mass spam is an inappropriate and unpersuasive tactic.

I totally agree with the MP (the audience faints in shock) and think this sort of blunderbluss spamming of MP’s email and postbags is frankly just a waste of time. The MPs are going to, understandably treat 30 identical letters as just one complaint – as it is so obviously from just the one originating source.

Having said that I support the point that a DoS style spamming of their email addresses is a bad idea – I am slightly amused by the campaign to ‘cc every email on a specific date to our illustrious Home Secretary to protest against the government plans to keep a record of every single email transaction I engage in.

Incidentally, having a secure link to my email server – which happens to be in the USA – tends to render that law impotent.

A while back I mused on whether there is a standard size for dishwasher tablets – and was rudely reminded of that posting when I got a spam email from China asking if I want to import dishwasher tablets from them.

Le sigh

While I do indeed buy them – I prefer to buy a small packet from the local shop, not to import a container load from China. After all, I doubt my neighbors would appreciate the dirty container sitting in the car park for, oh – maybe the next few hundred years.

So, Mr Zhang of  Zhengzhou Twidecks Trade in Zhengzhou, China – please improve your market research before sending out emails.