It isn't news to me that dealing with spam makes me irritated and angry. I resent the intrusion into my email, and then I resent the time I spend dealing with it, and in fact I resent its very existence. This is not a rational irritation and hatred; I viscerally dislike spam and people and organizations who spam me. Sensible people would resent spammers only for the time and effort they take to deal with, but I am angry all out of proportion with that.

(This anger is part of what pushes me to think about and try to design elaborate potential anti-spam measures, even when this isn't necessarily wise. It is not that I enjoy the challenge of it all or the like, it is that I want to frustrate spammers.)

What I've recently clued in to is that even thinking about spam often makes me angry, not merely dealing with it. Perhaps this shouldn't surprise me, since I know my reaction is a visceral one and just being reminded of things will set off that sort of reaction, but it kind of does. I am a happier person when I can spend as long as possible paying as little attention as possible to all things involving spam; the less I think of it at all, the better it is for me.

That sounds awfully abstract, so let me make it concrete. I have yet another case of Google being a spammer mailing list provider, and I considered writing it up for Wandering Thoughts. Then I realized that even thinking about it was making me grumpy and soaking in the situation for long enough to write an entry would be even worse, since I can't write an entry about a spam incident without having the spam incident on my mind for the entire time I write.

So, I have decided that I will probably not write that entry. I am angry about the spam and angry at Google and I would like to hold them up to the light (again), but it is not worth it. I would rather be non-angry. Since any reminder about Google's culpability will probably not help, it would also be sensible for me to entirely block email from Google to my spamtrap addresses so I'm completely unaware of any future cases.

It's possible that this will cause me to write less about spam in general on Wandering Thoughts, although I'm going to have to see about that. I lump sort of spam-related issues like DKIM and so on into my spam category, and I likely still have things to talk about there.

(DMARC as a whole is not necessarily an anti-spam feature. As commonly used, it may be more of an anti-phish one, although I'm not sure that works as well as you'd like. That's another entry, though.)