Ejovi Nuwere

This morning when I checked my email, I had 215 new pieces of mail in my inbox. Of the 215, 15 weren’t spam. Granted this is annoying, but I’ve taken it in stride. In all honesty receiving 200 pieces of spam a day is probably my fault.

I have had the same email address for nearly 5 years now. Over the last five years I’ve used my personal email address to post on mailing list, newsgroups, and of course my web site. To the “spambots” that crawl the Net I am the perfect target. Imagine a telemarketer with a million phone numbers that never change. The difference is that you can be removed from a telemarketers list; you cant from a spam list. Once you make it on a spam list, you’re in for life, sort of like the mafia.


I have accepted spam as one of those unpleasant things we have to deal with in life. The same way, as a young boy in little league baseball, I accepted that it would sometimes rain on the day I was scheduled to play. I grew to understand that despite singing “rain rain go away, come back another day” that the rain was there to stay. I have accepted that regardless of how many times I “unsubscribe” from a mailing list, they are never really going to let me go.

There is no real fix for the Spam issue. I use e-mail filters that separate “good” mail from “bad” mail and that helps a little but it isn’t perfect. Of course politicians realizes how annoying Spam is for their constituents and have begun working on laws & regulations that would prevent companies from sending Spam, similar to the FTC donotcall list, but it will do little to help. Spammers don’t play fair. If spammers played by the rules “unsubscribe” would really mean unsubscribe and not “wait a few days before you spam me again.”

Notice I didn’t say that it wouldn’t work, it will help. For example TicketMaster, the countries largest ticket broker, has found itself in trouble for selling the email address of its users and not allowing people to disable this function.

The worst part isn’t the fact that it sells its customer database to third parties; my bank does that. The worst part is it doesn’t give you the ability to disable it. I feel like a victim with no rights being violated every morning and it hurts.

Damn you Spam, damn you.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2003 at 12:00 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.