Porn spammers are the lowest of the low. The have no clue who is on the other end, no respect for the young or easily offended, they just send out their filth to anyone who is unlucky enough to have trusted their address to an unreliable source.
There are so many things I don’t understand about spammers. Like - people who disguise their address, put billsmith@NOSPAMhotmail.co obviously don’t want junk mail, and are taking efforts to stop getting it. Therefore you’d figure that Bill Smith isn’t going to rush out to buy from you if you do spam him, right? Yet they run address harvesters that filter out words like NOSPAM. They’re sending advertising material to people who have hung a “No Circulars” sign on their letter box - and they think that’s going to win them sales how?
Then there’s the old “Free Speech” argument. How is spam free speech when it costs me and my ISP money to recieve it? You’re entitled to your free speech, but not on my money. I pay for my online time, and while your spam may cost me only a fraction of a cent, all the spam I recieve over all time is going to cost me money that I didn’t agree to pay. That’s so wrong! That’s like a telemarketer calling me collect, but not giving me the option to refuse the call.
Then again, I don’t see how spam is an effective marketing tool, because I can’t imagine what kind of person would buy from someone who has shown themselves to be dishonest by their very marketing campaign. For a start, they steal your email address - they run a program designed to scour the internet for email addresses, meaning you can’t even sign someone’s guestbook without fear of being spammed. Then they sell your email address to other spammers. Then they violate the TOS of their ISPs by using their ISP’s private networks to send massive amounts of junk mail. They forge the return address and the paths taken to reach you to try to pass the blame to someone else. And then they want you to do business with them? Yeah, right. Meanwhile, your ISP needs to increase the bandwidth to cope with the influx of traffic, a cost that is passed on to you, and to upgrade his mail server to hold all the extra junk, a cost which is also passed on to you. It is estimated by some that up to 30% of all email traffic is spam.
I don’t know if any of you have ever lost an email account to spam, but I have. My first email account was a Hotmail account. I signed up for it the first day I was on the net, and (not knowing anything about spam), I agreed to list it in the Hotmail Member’s Directory (on the theory “How else are people supposed to find me?”). Then I used it all over the net, on guestbooks, as a contact address for genealogy sites, on my own website. Of course it was harvested, and I started getting annoying junk mail, a couple of times a week. Over a period of time, it escalated until I was getting over 150 pieces of unsolicited junk mail a week. At that volume, I couldn’t sort out the real mail from the crap. I had to surrender the account. After Hotmail introduced their Junk Mail Folder, I reopened the account, but let it go again when I discovered that a lot of the junk bypassed the filters.
These days, I’m careful about how I use my real address. This means I’m not able to advertise my genealogy interests as widely, but I’ve had to sacrifice that for a clean in-box. I do still get some spam, and I always report it all to the ISPs of the jerks who send it - I use SpamCop to process it much of the time. Until I joined the Straight Dope, much of my time was spent on Anti-Spam resources. I joined Anti-Spam groups and did my best to help stamp out this irritating and irresponsible form of advertising. One day I’ll go back to Spam fighting, but it just feels like beating a dead horse a lot of the time.
What annoys me most is whenever I’m in a conversation with someone about the evils of spam, and I’m discussing how to report it and fight back, a third party will inevitably chip in and say “I just hit delete”. Now, this is the mantra chanted by spammers the world over. They want you to ignore all the dodgy and immoral things they did to bring their spam to you, and “just hit delete”. They call Anti-Spammers Nazis, and say we’re making a big deal over nothing. It’s not nothing. Spam has the potential to render email useless as a communication medium by its sheer volume. “Click here to be removed” from a list you didn’t sign up for? Well, sure. How many companies are there in the world? How many clicks would it take to remove yourself from all of their lists? This is why Opt-Out spam is such a bad thing. There are too many people keen to use this cheap form of advertising to harass the masses. We need to take a stand against it all before it overwhelms us. This is why I don’t “just hit delete”. If you’re not part of the solution… then you are part of the problem, and only if we all stand up and fight back will we rid the world of the worst form of advertising ever.
But I like canned lunch meat by Hormel. Go Spam! Woohoo!. 