Spam and I
Unsolicited offers teach us a dangerous lesson about
how to identify and dispose of physical garbage.

by Bill Cummings

"You are recieving [sic] an unsolicited commercial email from Quiksilver Enterprises Inc. We recognize that you may not wish to recieve [sic] such emails in the future, and we have provided a link to automatically and instantly remove yourself: REMOVE."

Spam removal is like wading through a garbage dumpster to be able to throw away one piece of trash.

Ah, spam, that surging wave of internet garbage even more distasteful than the pink meat product of the same name. It may be the only byproduct of the information age more annoying than those insidious pop-up windows that fill monitors with a flurry of unexpected advertisements. The spam quoted above came to me the other night from "misterpr@utility.net" and promised me ONE LAST CHANCE to purchase the "Banned CD"–and for the "superlow price of only $19.99" to boot.

This is exactly the kind of annoying waste of time that, even though it disappears in a click of the mouse, we all wade through in our inboxes each day. Show me a person who hasn’t complained about spam and I’ll show you a person who forgot their password. Garbage, it is clear, is overflowing on the Net. Fortunately, unlike real landfills, my trash folder has infinite capacity and no environmental consequences. Yet spam and the other unsolicited offers that come to us by phone and letter are teaching a dangerous lesson about how to identify and dispose of physical garbage in the non-electronic world.

It is seductively easy to deal with spam. Just select those messages from the inbox you don’t want and click DELETE. For the extra satisfaction that finality brings, pull down EMPTY TRASH FOLDER from the File menu. Just like that, it’s gone.

On the other hand, that only eliminates a single slice of spam, which is why federal guidelines stipulate that transmitters of bulk commercial email provide a way for consumers to remove themselves from the address lists that spammers use. Not wanting to be bothered by more trash from misterpr, I followed the link to http://www.compuzoneusa.com/remove.htm. Here I typed in my email address, hit UNSUBSCRIBE! and, presumably, have now lost all opportunity to hear about the cd "so controversial that eBay banned it forever!"

Of course, sending people to this page is just another opportunity to force them to look at advertisements (and another way to confirm that the recipient's email address is still accurate). In a sort of brinksmanship, a single subject line in my inbox has transformed itself into a full-screen web page, escalating our conflict. It’s like wading through a garbage dumpster to be able to throw away one piece of trash. The spammer hopes that though the email didn’t work, maybe this will hook you by holding your attention a few seconds longer.

 

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