During late November and all of December, my email was swamped with spam emails, 30 and 40 a day. I guess those folks had to finance their Christmas presents somehow. It stopped abruptly on Christmas Eve, down to fewer than 5 a day.
The last week of the year, I got a bunch of fundraising requests via text messages from people mostly purporting to be from liberal politicians, some of whom addressed me as “Kevin” (not my name). Is anyone stupid enough to send money to someone you don’t know who sends you a text? Well, I’m not. I just blocked all those number, not that it did much good, I expect they were all spoofed. Anyway, I haven’t had any of those since Sunday.
So now I can relax for another 9 months or so, and only worry about the fate of my country.
I love the holiday season, but I was glad when December 7 came around and the spam calls for Senior Benefit plans stopped. Some were even recorded, they didn’t give a s*** about me, If a live human was there I asked how the weather in India was, as most of them had Indian accents.
I am always amazed by the number of legitimate organizations that send out repeated fundraising requests at this time of year. It must work, or they wouldn’t do it, but November-January is the time of year when I am least likely to have any extra cash lying around, so all of that stuff gets deleted.
I wish I got the reduction of my spam e-mails at Christmas Eve. I got 56 today, about half of which were the same 3 senders. Most of them did go directly to my spam folder, but not all. That is a typical day. It’s wearing.
I got two fundraising emails from the director of a food bank each day for the ten days I was on vacation. In my work email account.
I can’t flag it as spam or block it because we actually work with that food bank.
She’s got her system set up to send these to everyone in her contacts every single day from November 1 to December 31.
I used to personally fundraise this food bank. Since she started spamming me, I stopped. It’s costing them $1500 a year, but I guess that’s a drop in the bucket compared with what her 61 emails to thousands of people must raise.
It is possible in most email clients to toss emails with specific phrases in the subject line or body directly to trash, so you may not need to block her email specifically, just the most common phrases in her spam.
The problem is that when we “do business” with them there are exactly the kind of phrases that would appear. And the subject lines are not consistent. Someone is spending time crafting the daily general message, relating it to the specific day or week, etc.
And I have tried to ask her to stop. Which resulted in one of her underlings blasting me in a message to several executives at my company, including my grand-boss. These are executives who appear with her in photo ops and even television appearances. Attend the annual gala and shell out $100k of company money for overpriced goodies (day on a yacht, weekend on a private island, etc)
She’s very mission-driven, but keeping peons at her major donor organizations happy isn’t part of her mission
Giving Begging Tuesday is the worst! I get multiple emails per day from the same charity(ies) leading up to & on the Tues after Black Friday.
I guess between thinking people are in a generous gift giving mood, thinking about those less fortunate (Salvation Army kettles, etc) & maybe even a little yearend tax deduction you’re gonna get 'em
