I don’t understand the attitudes some people have about spam email, and those who send it.
I’ve seen spammers referred to as if they were the most heinous criminals of our age. (And yes, they actually use the term “criminal”.) I’ve seen ISPs compared to Mafia-style criminal syndicates just because they don’t intrude on their customer’s privacy and watch what everyone’s doing to root out these alleged evildoers.
In short, what’s so friggin bad about spam? Is it mildly annoying? Sure. Is it a huge pain in the ass? Not really. Is it a heinous evil infecting our society like a plague? No. Fucking. Way.
See some spam? Type “D”, marked deleted, problem solved. Or for those that use non-text-based email readers, you may have to GASP check a box next to the email. OH HORROR OF HORRORS!! Or you could always just do the easy thing: keep your email address private, only give it to friends and business contacts, or companies/sites with good privacy policies. It’s not that frickin’ hard.
This is not 1995. We are not paying by the hour to connect to our mail servers with 8 baud modems anymore. In the era of high-speed internet connections, spam email is no more annoying than those glurge emails about Jesus appearing in some dying boy’s cereal that your ditzy relative sends you. (At least you don’t have to see the spammer at Thanksgiving.) Either way, you’re a keystroke or a mouseclick away from ridding yourself of it, so where’s the big frickin’ deal??
When you’re Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail or AOL Mail, all that spam is residing on your harddrive and it’s a problem.
When you are an employer who needs to make sure that pornographic email does not make it through your server to your recipients, but you want to make sure legitimate email always gets through, it’s a problem.
When you set up your filters so that adds for Viagra, breast and/or penile enhancements, and mortgage refinancing are automatically deleted, and rather than take the hint, you start getting email for Vi*gra, peni1e enhancements, and m0rtg4ge refinancing, it’s a problem.
When you want to give your 9 year old child an email account that isn’t hobbled, and ‘lesbian sluts doing it all for you’ is his/her first email, it’s a problem.
When my paltry 2MB Hotmail account refuses legitimate mail because I didn’t check it for 3 days and I’ve 1.5 megs of spam, it’s a problem.
When I pay for an IP connection, thus paying for you to send unsolicited advertisements WITHOUT receiving anything in return, it’s a problem.
When you are on a dial-up connection, and for every 3 kilobytes of legitimate email, you have to download 50 kilobytes of spam, it’s a problem
When you have to go through your post and change every ‘its’ to ‘it’s’, it’s a problem
you’re a keystroke or a mouseclick away from ridding yourself of it, so where’s the big frickin’ deal??
No, I’m roughly 150 mouseclicks away from it. Every single damn day. Or a shift-click, and I still have to read every single subject header just in case one of them is something I actually might want to read. If I don’t check my mail every day it fills my inbox so that the things I actually need can’t get in.
Imagine that you’re in a movie theater. Imagine that someone comes behind you and flicks your ear. Is it a minor annoyance? Yes. Is it a huge pain in the ass? Not really. Is it a heinous evil infecting our society like a plague? Probably not.
Now imagine that that person gets paid to flick people on the ear. In fact, he gets paid more the more people he flicks, and more if he just flicks one person repeatedly. Now your movie experience is reduced to constant ear-flickery. Imagine that every time you ask this person to stop, three more flickers join him in flicking you. Imagine this fad spreading across the country - every theater has flickers waiting to get you, and even when you rent movies, the store sends a flicker down to your house to make sure you get your flicking. Is it a minor annoyance? Yes. Is it a huge pain in the ass? Yes. Is it a heinous evil infecting our society like a plague? Indeed.
Here is info regarding a current bill in California legislature to actually allow you to get off spam lists.
The more I read the word “flick” the more I liked it. I think that’s one of my new favorite words!
Ahem, yes, the spam. That would be the topic of the OP. The first two posters pretty much nailed it. No, one or two spam emails isn’t a big deal, but 50-100 every day is. And I’m DAMN careful about who I give my email to. I have a whole seperate email account that I use when I sign up for stuff online. All it takes is for 1 spammer to get your address though. Just one. It’s all downhill from there.
Papa Tiger’s company has to delete many, many thousands of spam emails a day. This takes time and money. It costs HUGE amounts of money. The wasted resources that are spent on filtering and firewalling and deleting and sorting and analzying and resolving all the problems caused by spam are not to be believed. YOU are paying for it, ultimately, I hasten to add. It’s all part of that invisible corporate overhead that causes prices to go up. (In this case, at the local electric utility company.)
THAT is what is so evil about spam. Not that it bugs me. But that it’s causing every company I do business with to have to waste money fighting it, thereby causing everything I pay for to cost more.
I have a Yahoo! mail account, and don’t get a single piece of spam email on it, ever. I get occasional advertisements from C-net, but I signed up to download from there and don’t mind them at all. If you spread your email addy around on all sorts of sites, then you just put yourself through whatever minor hassle you might encounter by being careless.
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Why is it a problem if those messages get through? I suppose you might not want employees opening those mails, but deleting a few is no problem. Or you could set up a private mail-server for employees only, for interoffice communication. They shouldn’t be spending work hours reading personal emails anyway, right?
And presently there seems to be no effective way to filter out spam without tossing the baby out with the bathwater. I’d rather keep the mild annoyance of deleting a few spam messages then not get an email I wanted from a legitimate company.
The internet is for adults. If you want to let a child on it, you can either simply accept that it’s an adult environment and let the child learn about that world on his own, or look over his shoulder while he’s online to help him if he encounters those things, or put him in one of the kid-friendly artificial environments on the net via some NetNanny sort of program. Frankly, there is enough real, physical danger posed to children on the internet (child molesters lurking chatrooms and instant messaging), that I don’t think a piece of email should even be on the RADAR of your concerns.
See, I just doubt the magnitude of this alleged “problem”. What sort of rate plan charges an additional amount for each piece of spam mail you get? I want proof that this is actually costing people additional fees of any significant amount before I take this argument seriously.
I guess I think sending spam is like walking up to random people in the street and spitting on them. It’s not really that bad intrinsically – it doesn’t really hurt most people – but it shows a complete lack of respect.
Your advice to “keep your email address private, only give it to friends and business contacts or companies/sites with good privacy policies” is almost ridiculous in the context of your post. If spam is no big deal, only “mildly annoying”, why are such draconian measures required?
You realize Yahoo is filtering out the spam on your account, right? If they didn’t, you would get an insane amount of crap, just because you’re at Yahoo. You don’t have to give out your address if it’s @yahoo.com. They just spam every possible sequence of letters and numbers. It’s free: why wouldn’t they?
Well, this shows that obviously you don’t have a clue as to how the business world works these days. I’ve got news for you: People in offices use email to talk to clients and customers. People in offices use the internet to do research. Even on email addresses that are used only for business purposes, I don’t know anyone who hasn’t had spam get through, no matter how many filters are in place. Hell, my boss used to only work part-time, and I’d spend at least 20 minutes a day having to delete crap out of her inbox. And that was after filtering.
Spam wastes valuable resources, especially the time and money required for IT people to combat it so that people can use their email for legitimate purposes, whether personal or business.
No. I don’t have the knowlege to write the necessary scripts, for one thing. I don’t really like spam, either. But I dislike it moderately and label it a minor annoyance. I’d rather not have it, but I’d also rather not resort to some of the nasty tactics that the zealous anti-spam crew has been known to employ. And I’ve never seen a reason to really actively devote hatred towards it, as many apparently do. As for the spammers themselves, I’ve encountered a few ex-spammers on various message boards who subsidized their educations pretty well by doing it a few years back, and they all seemed to be perfectly nice people.
I’m not arguing that spam is good, merely that it isn’t so bad as many people argue. And when it comes right down to it, I couldn’t support making it illegal. (Though I do oppose some of the spammers’ methods, as when they pull a stunt like Nanoda mentions…but the mail and the spamming itself, not any illegal methods they might employ, is what I’m addressing here.) If companies have a right to advertise with snailmail, by sending me junk in my snailmailbox, then don’t internet companies have that same right?
Heck, some of the sjunk mail I get through snailmail is actually useful, I get coupons biweekly to my favorite pizza joints, to KFC, to LJS, and so on. One could easily imagine a world where spam email might even be welcomed and occasionnally useful, if the internet were not made up almost entirely of pornography sites. I wouldn’t at all mind getting e-coupons from Papa John’s or Pizza Hut, for instance, or a list of the specials going on sale this week at Gerbes grocery store where I shop.
I guess I get one or two pieces a month in the folder labelled “junk mail”, so perhaps somebody is sending something, I really don’t pay that much attention. But it certainly isn’t an “insane” amount. And if such a filter were in place, that would render D_Odds’ first point moot.
I get all my work assigned to me through email. My employer pays me for the extra wasted time (5-10 minutes) that it takes me to sort through all that spam to find the messages for my job.
Now multiply that by the rest of my co-workers, and it starts to add up.
When I have to deal with my company’s email servers getting spammed, it’s a problem. I’m the email administrator for my company, and I’ve had our mail connector get totally clogged with spam hitting it. Someone figures out our domain name, the sends as many variations of names that the can find to get a few through. The mail connector starts trying to process it; and if the spam keeps up, it dies. So I have to fix that.
To stop that, we buy software to help stop spam. This software is not cheap. This is real money we have to spend, because of people sending out tons of email. And it won’t stop it all. So people still have to sort through it, which takes time. Money to buy filtering software, money to pay me to work on something I shouldn’t have to, money for our employees to sort through it. Plus, our Internet connection is not a flat rate, we pay for usage on the bandwidth. Each one of those emails costs money. Even if we filter them out, we still paid for them to be sent to us.
I use my Yahoo for things that I wouldn’t want on my private email account: read that myfirstname@mylastname.com and I get shit loads of SPAM
I gather you know little about interoffice and recieving email from the outside. This is an IT nightmare in itself let alone expecting “interoffice email” only. That defeats the purpose of email which is excellent communications with your clients and internally as well. I think you haven’t really thought this through. As a former IT manager, it’s highly redundant and one last thing an IT manager would want to fuck around with.
Again, not well thought through. One person signing up with one “company” with an office email that sells email addresses can net literally hundreds of spam per day for many people.
The internet is for all ages, not just adults. It’s no different than taking your kids to the mall. You want to bring them up well and what parent wouldn’t but you also have to allow them to test the waters. The internet is not for adults, it’s just the world confined in data, bits and bytes…but email is just as a useful communication tool for kids as is the telephone and snail mail. There is no reason to restrict it to just adults, that’s just ludicrious.
Spam creates a lot of unwanted traffic for a lot of service providers which is exactly why people hate the shit, increased spam can also increase the cost behind the scenes. While most people don’t see it, it is a hidden expense and less traffic also means less people in IT having to ward off potential viruses, worrying about domains with limited transfer rates in their plan that isn’t located on a local level, etc… There is cost although many people like you don’t see it.
Not everyone has unlimited amounts of mailbox space and when you get back from a week of vacation, having to read through the fucking bullshit is fucking annoying as hell. It’s like having solicitors call you at your home when you are eating dinner. It’s fucking annoying and fucking lame. If I want to seek out your product, I will. If I am not looking for Viagra (which BTW, I don’t need) I sure as fuck don’t need it in my inbox nor do I need the sales guy calling me up in the middle of my wonderfully grilled steak to try to sell me on vinyl siding when I don’t even own the fucking house.
Granted I don’t pay for my Yahoo account but it can get filled up in a matter of a day. This is one of the older 6 MB accounts (the newer ones are 4 MB…) if I don’t keep up on it, it gets filled up way too quick.
SO, in order to answer your subject line…there are hidden costs that you don’t see, my time (albeit a small amount) is more important that having to delete 100 SPAMs from one of my accounts. SPAM is evil and the less of it the better off we would be.
BTW, I would NEVER buy anything I got from SPAM, never. It’s a wasted resource that at least for me, I don’t get hung into buying some shit I don’t want. It’s annoying as hell and if I could stop it 100% like I have with the phone calls I used to get, I would be happy as a clam. I think clams are pretty happy too.
What pipe-dream office do you work in? Employees use email to read and forward glurge to their friends and family. Employees use the internet to screw around on company time. That’s what internet access is used for in the working world. I’ve only worked in an office for one summer, but from what I learned there and what I hear from people who have worked in office environments these days, any business would probably double its productivity by removing internet access from all computers and place a few terminals scattered about the office with access for legitimate research. The office where I worked didn’t have internet access on any computers except those in IT (duh) and in the executives’ offices.
How can it really take you 20 minutes to delete unwanted email? Even on a crummy email reader like Outlook Express, you can delete messages much faster than that. How long does it take to check some boxes? And if you really wanted to cut down on time, install a text-based reader like Pine. You log in, and before even opening the messages (anybody should be able to recognize a spam without opening it by now) you see 20-30 spam messages in a row, all you have to do is hold down the “D” key as it runs through them. I could delete 100 messages with Pine in about 30 seconds. Another way, with these newer email readers, would be to just check “delete all” and then un-check the ones you want to keep (if you’re really getting that much spam.)
If you don’t get spammed, then you cannot imagine what it is like to have hundreds of emails per week - in certain cases per day - flooding through. You don’t even have to be that careless to get caught on spam-lists. One posting of your email on a public forum can do it. Owning a domain name - they just come like flies. One dodgy subscription site sells your email without your knowledge to one spam list, and then it’s open season.
Spam is very often offensive, it wastes time, and it costs a LOT of money. Both in bandwidth/connection time and lost productivity.
I have had emails with the title “Wild horses and young teens fucking.” Can you imagine your nine-year old child getting something like this? Or endless penis enlargement ads, or herbal viagra. I get all those, and I have NEVER pretended to be a man filling in any subscription form. Spam is totally indiscriminate - the spammers do not care if they reach children, old people, nuns, whatever.
This would be one of those situations where a private intra-office email system, not connected to the internet at all, could distribute these assignments easily. I know these systems are possible, all the computers are networked together, it would probably be quite simple. That way you could get your assignments in a convenient electronic message, and not get spam (and the people who use their work email for personal correspondance wouldn’t get those personal emails either, so productivity goes up even further.)