It had been so long since I had received any spam over ICQ that I had forgotten how much of a problem it once was, but it appears to be back in full force. At least once a day or so I receive an authorization request from an unknown account and I have to look it up in the ICQ whitepages to see if it’s legitimate first. Usually there’s random junk in its profile, so I block it.
Except that’s not the end of it. They’ll continue sending authorization requests every few seconds, and although the client no longer prompts me once it’s blocked, it still fills up the activity log window. There’s often spam text in the authorization request message itself. They switch account numbers often, so you get reprompted and have to block the new accounts. And they keep sending the requests even when you’re offline. When I got up this morning, so many requests had been queued that Fire couldn’t handle it and I couldn’t even stay logged in; I had to log in at the office with a different client to clear them out, one at a time.
It’s almost enough to make me block *all* requests from non-buddies and make people contact me by other means first to be added. IMing is supposed to make communication *more* convenient though, not less…