What Happened One morning in mid-May, 2006 my husband was shocked to find over 20,000 email messages in his inbox. He started reading and quickly discovered that his email address had been hijacked. Someone else (somewhere on the planet) was sending lots and lots and LOTS of spam, with forged email headers to make it look like the email came from my husband's account. We have no idea why they picked him of all people, but whatever the reason it's been a total nightmare. I've now had several people contact me asking for the spam to stop, and I can only tell them that I'd love to make it stop, but I don't know how. It's a bit like mailing something horrible at the post office and writing someone else's return address on the envelope. The person who receives the horrible thing in their mailbox will naturally be annoyed at the supposed sender, when in reality it was someone else altogether. But email should be different, right? There should be some sort of computer postmark that can't be faked, right? It turns out that there is that sort of identification, but it happens at a deeper level than email. The computer postmark is much more specific than a post office postmark, and it tells you much more about where an email (or any other piece of data) came from, but unfortunately email readers don't look at the postmark. All the email program looks at is the address portion, which can be easily faked. And so here we are, with thousands of email messages pouring out from hundreds of different locations, all claiming to come from my husband's email account. And the part that's absolutely terrifying? I've spent years building up my business. I'm just one person, working out of my garage at home when I'm not busy being Mom to a two-year-old. My entire business is based on my webpage and it's just now reaching the point where I can see that someday it might actually bring in enough money to support us. I've had no social life and no time for pleasure reading. I've poured all my free time and more energy than I could really spare into this business because I love it and it brings me deep satisfaction. These spammers could trivially destroy everything that I've been working so hard to build. Let's say that this problem continues, and people start blocking all email coming from spiderchain.com. All of a sudden, my order confirmations don't get delivered. My responses to questions don't get delivered. All the communications that are the core of any online business don't work any more. And *poof* there goes everything that I've built up. So spammers, if you're reading this, please have mercy! I'm terrified that you're going to destroy my business and it's all going to be for nothing. Please. Mercy.