Mellowing?
I used to loathe spam. I would get a couple of spam messages a day, and I would respond to each one with self-righteous indignation. I would try to get spammers' accounts removed, I would report them to abuse@their-isp, I would send messages saying REMOVE. The guy with the laser-printer toner cartridges was the worst—he had an 800 number which went to a recording saying he happened to be out of the office but leave a message. I once called him and kept the line open for about half an hour just to run up his phone bill.
With the most egregious spammers, I would even use a cool mail utility at Pair that would send legitimate-looking bounce messages when you received an email from a specified address, thereby making it look like my email address wasn't valid any more.
But these days, even though I get several times as much spam, somehow it just doesn't bother me as much. Maybe I'm losing my edge, or maybe I'm realizing that staying angry all the time isn't an enjoyable way to live. I know now (or at least strongly suspect) that "remove" addresses are likely to be ways for spammers to verify that the address is valid. The spam is generally easily recognizable—a lot of it these days is in non-ASCII languages, for example, so garbage characters in the subject line is a pretty good indicator—and I don't even open it any more, just delete it.
Once in a while, I do open something even though it looks like spam. I'm rewarded just often enough to keep me doing it—for example, almost all of the mail to Alex's old email is spam, but the other week there was a message from a friend of his whom I hadn't known.
And then, too, some spam is entertaining. Some because it's so badly written, but some because of its chutzpah. This, for example, recently showed up in the fiction@sh mailbox:
This email is NEVER sent unsolicited. THIS IS NOT SPAM. You are receiving this because you have either answered classified ad, posted to our FFA pages, are on the same opt-in list or have sent me something in the past.
Uh-huh.