Spam

Below is the random thought titled "Spam". Be aware that these thoughts may be based on opinion, and my opinion might not agree with yours. Also, the thought below may be based on mood, time of day, or any number of other factors. Please keep this in mind.

Yesterday, I got back from spending 5 days on a round trip from Indiana. I was there to attend RX-7 Revolution, but that is not reaally the point. The point is that out of 600 emails I received while I was gone (I didn't feel like making the effort to find 'Net access and check my mail while I was away), 450 of them were spam.

This is absolutely ridiculous, but completely normal. What made me write this is that yesterday, on The Screensavers a spammer called into the show. He didn't think what he was doing was wrong, didn't care that people didn't want his "offers", thought that the people who he was mailing had actually "opted in", and suggested that if people don't want to receive spam they disconnect from the 'Net. Needless to say, he was a 17 year old asshole and I hope he is paralized in a bus accident (death is too good for him). Quite frankly, I am sick and tired of the hassle spam has created for me.

It's not the reception of the spam that bothers me. I use a program called SpamPal to filter my incoming mail, and it does an excellant job. Very rarely do I get a false positive, and only aboyut 1 of 100 spam messages leak through. The problem for me is mostlty created by other people's improper spam filtering techniques. For example, any email I send to an @AOL.COM address is rejected with a "550...Goodbye" error. Very descriptive. Only after digging around AOL's website for several hours did I find out that I may be on thier block senders list (for whatever reason). However, that is only a maybe, and they offer no way to get off this list. Great. Next step is to call tech support, but I doubt that will have any positive result as I'm sure we all know how good AOL's tech support is. Plus, I should not even have to make this call.

That is just one example, but I'm sure there are many others I don't know about. Many ISPs are now blocking potential spam without even their customers knowing. The sender never knows, the customer never knows. Imagine how annoying this is for someone who does lots of eBay sales (such as, oh, me). I'm sure that many of the buyers who I can't contact simply don't get my messages.

But filtering is not the only problem. How about the fact that receiving all this spam wastes my bandwidth as well as server space, and slows down my mail reception? Or the spam I get on my Blackberry, annoyingly setting off the alarm all the time? Or the spam that does get through my filters, filling my screen with porn? And there's the most obvious one, in that I have NEVER OPTED INTO ANY COMMERCIAL MAILING LIST, EVER.

Do you agree? Disagree? Feel free to leave a comment by filling out the form at the bottom of the page. All comments are sent to me for approval, so hostile and pointless comments will be discarded. I will not discard comments that disagree with me, and I will certainly not edit comments. The only reason I am screening them is to keep the goof-balls under control. Email addresses will be hidden. If you wish to remain anonymous, simply enter "anonymous" for both your email and name.