Language Log: Chomsky and Schwarzenegger and me, and nutspam

With the coming of email, a vital resource that once had a real cost became essentially free for everyone. Once it used to cost at least a few pennies to send a communication through the mail, but now it is free. And one of the awful results is a new kind of deviant linguistic behavior in our culture: the mass-mailing of unsolicited loony outpourings. It needs a name; I suggest calling it nutspam. I have been receiving nutspam from several clearly deranged and annoying citizens. Probably none of them are doing anything that's against any law anywhere. They might even be protected by the First Amendment. One guy, in particular (a total stranger to me), seems to be ramping up. He sends out wild political (and occasionally personal) discontented ravings several times a day, from many different and frequently changing free email addresses he has set up. It's just ordinary email to valid email addresses that he has found on websites, and he isn't selling anything. But it's not just a few addresses that he mails to. This guy is mailing his daily screeds to the American Civil Liberties Union; former Senator Al Gore; Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California; the city council and city manager of Santa Cruz, California; the entire staff of the School of Engineering and numerous other faculty members at the University of California, Santa Cruz, plus its student newspaper; most of the reporters and editors on the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News; Professor Noam Chomsky and several other MIT faculty members; several faculty members at the University of Chicago; the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission in Washington; the University of Phoenix; the fiction editor at The New Yorker; CNN Headline News; the Associated Press; the Berlitz company in Japan; the Baseball Hall of Fame; the House Judiciary Committee; the letters pages of the New York Post, the New York Times, Rolling Stone magazine, and the San Jose Mercury News; the acquisitions editors of the University of Chicago Press, Macmillan, W. W. Norton, Random House, and numerous smaller publishing houses; the Brazilian, Nigerian, Peruvian, and Russian embassies; the Gmail administration team's "no-reply" address; the "report abuse" address for Yahoo!; and hundreds of others, including all of his own different addresses (talking to himself) — nearly 500 addressees in all, visible in the "To:" field and thus available for capture and further spamming (so far, mercifully, no one has started replying to the entire list). What does the nutspammer mail about? Oh, that President Ahmedinejad and everyone appointed by G. W. Bush should step down and the US constitution must be reformed and new countries must be created and cartels and inequality must be eliminated and the decline of the minimum wage is bad and so is the financial crisis and he has failed to get certain jobs that he applied for and all university regents and administrators and sports team owners and Supreme Court justices should be terminated and their property reappropriated by the people and all universities should be run by ecology students and there should be redistribution of wealth and cessation of wastefulness… all in a babbling, wandering stream of unpunctuated urgent staccato clauses without initial capitals. It changes a little from day to day, but the general flavor is something like a liberal version of the Unabomber without the letter bombs. Hardly any of the hundreds of people who get these daily (sometimes multiple) missives can prevent them being delivered. (Hardly any of us run good mail filtering programs that we know how to maintain and tweak: we aren't all administrators of our own mail delivery domains, and anyway it's not as if the configuring and command language of procmail were a piece of cake.) All we can do is hope for this guy to get well again, or else (more sadly) have an accident that somehow tragically breaks all of his fingers. Anything to put him out of the email business. Until that day, we unlucky recipients — Chomsky and Schwarzenegger and the rest of us — have to peck away at our email inboxes, recognizing his latest aliases and deleting his latest foaming-at-the-mouth nutspams. In a way, I'd like to get to this guy and punish him — at least cut the keyboard cable on his computer or something. But in another way I guess he has been punished enough: he apparently has no job, and his only occupation is sending out nutspam. I do wish he'd stop; but on balance I guess I'd rather be me deleting it than be him sending it.