A little over two years ago, I made my smartest computing decision since the time, back in the ’80s, when I chose a Mac SE to take with me to college. It was a simple yet life-changing decision to take control of my own e-mail, by acquiring my own domain name, adding POP service to it, and moving my primary e-mail address there.

My primary purpose in doing so at the time was to free myself to hop between cut-price dialup ISPs, without having to constantly worry about changing my e-mail addresses. (Thankfully, I was eventually rescued from that communications purgatory of bare-bones telephone service, cheap dialup Internet, and lifeline cable television when I got a raise at work and then took advantage of an excellent bundling deal from BellSouth.) The best and most lasting benefit, however, was nearly two years without spam in my primary e-mail box.

How did I manage that? It was a combination of precautions on my part, and the vagaries of the trade on the spammers’ part. The most important precaution was to establish a Yahoo! Mail account, and then give out only that address, to everyone except the most trusted sources. What helped me out on the spammers’ end is that it hardly pays for them to seek out e-mail boxes on custom domains like mine…domains they may not even be aware of.

Perhaps a little explanation would be in order. Spam operations tend to focus on domains where they know there are a lot of e-mail addresses—AOL, EarthLink, various other ISPs, Hotmail, Yahoo!, et cetera. A large number of e-mail addresses means it is worthwhile for them to try two favorite methods of reaching people: One, to try to figure out ways to harvest e-mail addresses (via hacking, monitoring traffic, or suchlike); two, to simply blast millions of e-mails to the service in question, each addressed to a more-or-less random guess as to what e-mail addresses might be in existence.

But it’s not worth the time or bandwidth to employ these tools against a single person who has set up his e-mail on some custom your-name-here.com domain…nor even to find and catalog such domains in the first place. Therefore, so long as I was careful (read: paranoid) enough to prevent my e-mail address from actually being handed to spammers on a plate—either directly or indirectly—I was home free.

And so I was; and it lasted for almost two years.

A few months ago, however, either I slipped up or they found me via some new spamming technology. First a small trickle of spam started coming in; now it’s more of a tidal wave. Or so it seems to me—I’m sure there are people whose addresses have been published on the Internet for some time who would want to slap me for complaining about a laughably small total of a dozen spam e-mails a day. But to me that’s an extreme imposition, since I lived without any spam at all for almost two years; and I didn’t have any filtering setup in place when it started to come in.

The holiday from spam, and now my rude reacquaintance with it, not only left me more sensitized to the annoyance of spam, but also to the pointlessness of it. How many idiots can there be out there who would arrange to refinance their home through some jerk who sent them a barely-literate nuisance message out of the blue? How many fools would trust a spammer who sent them an e-mail touting pH,rMa/cUt!iCls (the mangled drug names being an attempt to get around spam filters) with not only their money but their health…and for that matter, why aren’t more of them already dead from taking counterfeit drugs? How many people could there be out there who regularly use e-mail, but are somehow unable to get any information about where they might get an attractive loan offer or the prescription drugs they need, except through random spam?

Who would do any sort of business whatsoever with these parasites, who devote most of their time to finding new ways of getting around safeguards that people have put in place for the express purpose of not having to hear from them ever again? (And if we find out who, shouldn’t we go take away their computers, and telephones and power tools and firearms and car keys as well, to stop them from hurting themselves or someone else?)

Anyhow, it all seemed quite perfectly pointless to me already; but then, just this past week, I started seeing something new in my junk mail folder, something that topped all else.

Blank spam.

That is, a spam e-mail, with a standard spammy random/nonsensical/garbled/missing subject line, and no text.

No text. Nor any return receipt requests, malicious attachments, hidden scripts, or anything else. Just plain old nothing.

What on Earth could the purpose of that possibly be? Do they now expect me to e-mail them to inquire how they might like to swindle me?

Bizarre. Idiotic. Infuriating.

And that, my friends, is the unbearable pointlessness of spam.