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I have mostly been of the opinion that spam is unsolicited commercial email... but I'm starting to change that opinion to 'any unsolicited, unwelcome email that wants something of you".

I hadn't heard of the "Gouranga" spam until very recently, and in the past week or so it seems to have taken some real life - I think I've seen it on the majority of the mailing lists I'm subscribed to, which is only a handful, and this morning I received it directly at one of my personal email addresses.

So I went googling for an answer as to what it was all about (feel free to search for it yourself), and found quite a number of references - many from 2003, few from 2004, and what looks like a real resurgence here in 2005. And unfortunately the prevailing attitude toward this sort of stuff is complacency... "it's a happy message", so it must be okay.

The problem is, the group responsible has defaced all sorts of objects in the UK with their message for years. A puzzling mystery for a lot of people, yet, it's not a "bad" message, so where's the harm? (Aside from defacing property, of course...)

The past few years it's turned into an online message. But let's think about what's really going on here... First, if you and I know that you and your friends and mailing lists, etc., have seen this message, then that means someone out there has gone and harvested your email address, and many many others, just like a dirty spammer. And, just like a dirty spammer, this person has gone and emailed tens of thousands of people (an extremely conservative estimate) with their message. Now, you may not mind this happy little message, but just like a dirty spammer, this person has eaten up tens of thousands of kilobytes of network bandwidth and hard drive space getting the message out to the mail servers it's been delivered to (networks & ISPs have to pay for this bandwidth, keep in mind).

So again, just like a dirty spammer, they've stolen people's resources to put their stupid little happy message out there. And while they may not be asking for your money, they're asking for your time, your bandwidth, your hard drive space, and your effort to pay attention and smile at their message.

And yet, if everyone is complacent about this sort of thing, then how far does the complacency go? If every silly little group out there wants to spread their message (of happiness, destruction, joyous bliss, whatever), then do we allow them to act like a dirty spammer to do so?

One other thing that nobody's mentioned is that while this entitiy appears to just be passing along an innocent friendly message, who's to say that they're not part of a spam operation? They could very well be harvesting email addresses, sending their message of happiness, finding out what's deliverable and what's not, and selling those lists of email addresses to the commercial-type spammers.

I'm generally not a conspiracy theorist, but I also don't believe that any spam we receive is just as innocent as it may appear on the surface, no matter if the message in the email is for boner juice or to supposedly just put a smile on your face - and on the point, I don't think complacency is doing any of us any good. Please, report spam.