I'm Blocking Gmail

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve been inundated with spam aimed at authors. Spammers pretending to be publishers, literary agents, publicists, book club organizers, radio station honchos, movie moguls, library system administrators, etc. They all want to drool over my book. In fact a good 20% of them inform me that they came across my book.

Eudora spam filter instruction: change subject to “Ewww”

They want to feature my book or represent it or publish it (even though the only titles they ever mention are already published), if only I’ll sign up with them and send them a special reduced price for the privilege…

These parasites are disproportionately writing to me from gmail addresses. Out of over 1600 such spam emails that I’ve been saving in a “Book Scams”, 1359 of them are from gmail accounts and only 339 are from other domains. In contrast, looking at my non-spam email in various email folders from the current year I have 775 emails from gmail users and 5182 from other domains.

I’ve looked up ways of contacting gmail administration at Google and sent reports that included the email accounts and subject lines and dates: insert sound of crickets chirping.

Fuckit. New Eudora filter. If it’s addressed to my primary email address and comes from gmail, filter into Book Scams and delete from server immediately. I’ll fish out the legitimate ones and add them to my address book which will give them future immunity from this.

2

Neither one sounds good for the book.

3

I’m surprised your own mail service’s spam filter lets all those emails through. I still have my almost 30 years old Hotmail address (now named, like everything MS email, Outlook), and though Hotmail once was notorious for getting spammed, for many years I have rarely gotten spam, and if yes, it lands in my personal spam folder. I also have a t-online.de and a Gmail address and don’t get spam there, either.