I’m work for a firm that does consulting. To communicate with my clients, to exchange the files that I work on, to communicate with out mutual vendors, we all use email. I could not serve my clients without email.
My firm has a huge, secure research site accessible by the internet. Not the intranet - the internet (actually both, as it is quicker in the office over the intranet). You see, we consult, so we are not always in the office (sometimes we even get the joy of telecommuting). I need that research to work. Thanks to VPNs and other networking options I’m unaware of, I’m able to go into a clients office, plug into the internet from their network with my laptop, and pull down the information I need from my firm and email it to them from my firm’s email to their firm’s email.
That’s ignorance talking Rex. Help fight the war, not continue it.
Obviously you live in your own little dream world.
Millions upon millions of dollars are exchanged every day because of legitimate email. My brother’s company, for example, has gone as closely as they can to all construction subcontractor bids being emailed on a bid day. Yep, you got it, most anymore if a subcontractor doesn’t have the ability to send them a bid for a specific job by 2:00 pm on a bid day, you can consider them out of the loop and they will not be considered for the building of a Wal*Mart, Home Depot and other retail entities…despite the economy being slow, with their inovations in using electronic communication, they are still going gangbusters and are as busy as they were three years ago.
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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.)
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Read up further, you will learn that one email to the wrong company can get your email address sold to a lot of companies who will also sell your name.
Again, you are blindsided by your own ignorance. SPAM costs people money. The interoffice “spam” doesn’t nearly tap into the costs of outside spam that can often include things like viruses and large attachments/HTML that can and do clog up office broadband connections…been there, done it.
So Sparky, you are misguided and need a semester in IT management (or four) to understand why SPAM causes corporations and small business owners like me headaches we would rather not deal with.
Each minute we spend on fucking around with SPAM is a minute we are not using to deal with clients or contacting potential clients.
The internet is not like the mall. The internet is like creating a 50-story library, and filling the entire library with pornographic magazines except for a small alcove on the top floor with a handful of adult non-fiction, a few copies of popular periodicals, and about 3 children’s books. There would also be meeting rooms on the first 49 floors to discuss pornography, and to lie about your age and occupation and exchange fake photos in an attempt to get dates and/or seduce young boys. That’s the proportion we’re talking about here. Would you take your kid to such a library?
As I mentioned earlier, it’s redundant and a complete nightmare for IT people to maintain.
Two separate email systems…fuck that. I would rather put into policy that NO company email address is used to buy, barter, sell, sign up for…in addition, many companies do monitor employee email for content and for such shit. One email per employee is enough.
Kid, please take a course in networking, you will understand more if you realized that there’s much more to email management than opening an email address.:rolleyes:
You know, I was counting down the seconds until some colossal moron made that precise remark thinking he was being “clever”. I’m surprised the thread went on so long before someone finally did.
Despite the fact that bandwith and access speeds are greater these days, so is the proportion which is wasted on processing spam. Fully 78% of my incoming mail is spam. Given that I am on a couple of mailing lists which produce about 40-50 legitimate messages per day, that’s about 200 messages which I need to delete, every day. Sure, the filter takes care of it in the background, but it still costs me connection bandwidth, processor time, and my own time in double-checking that I have not accidentally missed anything legitimate.
It is good to see that there are individuals like yourself who do not see this as a serious problem. Please send me your e-mail address so I can bounce all of my incoming spam to you.
BTW, I don’t have kids but I do have nieces and nephews. The internet was never intended to sell porn, it was intended to create communications for universities and for the government. The porn industry saw a cool way to make more money and they latched on to it.
However, with that said, me getting a SPAM for some trumped up refinancing loan on the house I don’t own is annoying as all hell. I don’t need a bigger penis as, well, I don’t own a penis. The closest I come to having a penis is my vibrator.
I also don’t need to know that Bank of Utopia has a great credit offer of 0% for six month because I can’t get credit if I bled for it.
Living in the area I do, we have some of the best municipal water in the country, I don’t need some super duty water filtrating system.
If I had kids I don’t think they would need to those either.
Got it Sparky? If I had kids, they don’t need a credit card at age 8. They don’t need Viagra nor do they need to refinance a home mortgage.
The internet is not for adults only…that’s like saying TV is. It’s for all ages so your arguement doesn’t lead me to agree with you.
BTW, my cousin’s husband has his two girls this week. I am working for him as my modem went belly up. The girls had been at his office today and were playing games on Disney. I gather that’s against your rules too. Disney games for kids or the mulitude of other site dedicated to children.
Surely, the internet is not for kids. Disney and others like it have porn built into it. :rolleyes:
You’ve worked in one office for a brief period, without internet access.
And armed with this world of experience you’ve formed the conclusion that people in office environments do not need internet access? Further, we don’t even need external email.
I’m afraid you are vastly ignorant about the working world. I get the impression that you’re simply trying to wind us up, however, so I won’t bother expending the effort correcting you.
That’s not possible for us. I don’t just deal with people from my own workplace. I have to work with outside vendors, other schools, government agencys, etc… I have to maintain an internet email box for all these people to be able to contact me. I can’t put them all on a personal spam-free network.
This is one example of spam with an actual demonstrated cost. It’s no less of a cost than if you had telemarketers calling your companys switchboard all day. Sure, they can just hang up, but it takes time that the company pays for.
I have pretty much zero personal experience with the woes that businesses deal with in regards to spam, and I personally find spam as an irritant but nothing earth-shattering. To be honest, I was pretty ignorant of how horrible and expensive spam could be, so this thread has been a real education.
However, even though I am woefully ignorant of this issue myself, it’s kinda obvious from this thread that most everyone else on this thread has far more first-hand business experience than you do, RexDart. They are all providing you with more than enough evidence to support their feelings about the problem of spam. And all you can offer in return is your own personal experiences from working in an office for one SUMMER?!?! That’s it?
Shit–I have no personal knowledge of this issue myself, but I can see when someone is being outnumbered and outgunned, and honey, you’re being both. I’ll take techchick’s, Berkut’s, Narrad’s and everyone else’s word over your’s, any day. They have spent more than “one summer” in an office, I’ll warrant.
There are plenty of messages on SDMB between 8am and 5pm. A few are probably from people who work at home, some from people in Europe. But that ain’t even close to the majority of them. That means that this very message board is testament to the fact that people use their internet access at work to goof off on company time.
And the apparent reason the place I worked had no such access for the common employee at his desk is that it would “be distracting”, according to my supervisor. (I never had used a computer while I was there anyways.) Nor did they, until just a couple months ago, have it where my friend Mike works, at the DFS. Since they got internet access there, despite the overload of cases in an understaffed child support enforcement division, apparently his office is surfing the net like crazy (and there’s nothing they could possibly need it for, none of their procedures involve it.) Heck, alot of people I’ve encountered on message boards are using file sharing programs to download Metallica songs at work, since the speed there is better than their little dialup AOL account at home.
It would seem from all the anecdotal accounts from just about everyone who works in an office environment that internet access = employees goofing off. Seems like a waste of time that might be costing the company more money in lost productivity than “fighting spam” could ever create.
Yes, mah’dear, you forget the hardworking people that come on here:
During their breaks
During their lunch
Can’t even access the SDMB (which is banned more than you know)
Simply access while they are at home
Or WOW, have time away from their normal duties that isn’t your concern
AND, the fact that it has little to do with your rant from the get-go about SPAM you wiener.
Sheesh, get with the program.
You bitched about SPAM and people with multitudes of experience have told you why it is evil and yet you have little evidence to prove yourself correct.
Let’s look at it this way: How would you view the paper “junk” mail in your home mail box if every single piece of mail delivered were charged to you even if you didn’t read the thing?
IMHO, spam & telemarketing are two versions of the same unethical and ought to be illegal act: making use of my resources for their business without paying me for the use of those resources.
Rex, you’re really digging yourself deeper and deeper here. You’ve been here awhile, you do understand that you’re making a horrible case for yourself.
You’re arguing with people who currently work in office environments completely dependent on internet access with personal ancedotes obtained through working one summer in an office where you didn’t even work on a damn computer!
Comon’ man!
Not everyone has 9 to 5, clock in, clock out, dibertesque jobs. Your extremely limited experience in this area is hardly compelling enough to disregard posts made my IT professionals and other professionals dependent on the internet. The working world isn’t like it was 5 or 10 years ago.
Well, my imaginary children would love a good soft-core porn extravaganza now and then. What’s wrong with your imaginary children? Damn puritan.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/01/03/spam.costs.ap/ “A study to be released this week attempts to quantify the annual cost of spam: $8.9 billion for U.S. corporations, $2.5 billion for European businesses and another $500 million for U.S. and European service providers.”
I don’t know if this study figures in non-business costs like the waste of time to anyone checking email while not at work. Time = Money = Money That Could Have Been Spent on Porn = TRAVESTY!
I will admit to not reading the entire thread…so shoot me.
But here’s a hint, in case no one has brought it up.
DO NOT use the “take me off your list” button, or whatever it disguises itself as. You won’t get any more spam from that particular place, but they -WILL- sell it to a gazillion other places.
I just delete the crap. And I get maybe two or three a day…at most. My fiance was getting a ton of it all the time. When I told him about not sending the equivalent of the do not call message, he stopped, and his spam dropped considerably.
Ah, but you haven’t shown that it’s evil, and that was precisely the point of my OP. You’ve shown that it can be an inconvenience, and possibly an expense to one degree or another, and I’ve tried to explore ways to get around that inconvenience, and you’ve argued that those ways are infeasible, and so on and so on until we arrived here. But that’s a far cry from demonstrating that spam is “evil”, which is a descriptive term that requires a little more than what you’ve done so far.
If you’ll note my OP, I agreed that spam was annoying. What I was concerned with were people who exaggerated the importance of it in just such ways that they eventually, as you just did, end up calling it “evil.”
I understand you have more experience (though I will probably go on to discuss this with friends of mine who work as specialized instructors for future IT folk, network administrators and the like, to see what they think of all this.) So surely, within your experience, you can find plenty of things that are annoying and perhaps even costly impediments to completing your work. What I’m wondering is if spam warrants the special hatred it seems to receive from so many.