Who Doesn't Loath Spam?

Years ago, I was at the home of a business associate, a successful entrepreneur. As we walked up the driveway he took his daily mail out of his mailbox, quickly thumbed through it and dropped almost all of it, mostly letter sized envelopes, into the trash unopened. "Aren't you going to see what those are" another associate asked? "If it isn't worth sending first class it isn't worth reading" was his reply.

I still reflect on the pragmatic wisdom of that. And my recycle bin is no stranger to the unopened bulk rate pieces.

It is that thinking that has me considering the otherwise unpalatable idea that we should charge something per email. So that we have some way of determining value ... and to stop the spam email. It's just too easy for spammers. But yeah, paying for each email is crazy talk.

But I'm the one paying now! I use my ISP spam filter. On top of that I use the spam filter in my mail browser, which catches a lot. Then my security software flags what it thinks are spams and scams. I have a variety of complex filters, each of which comes with a cost and it's still a hassle dealing with the spam.

I learned a valuable lesson with my business email. Don't use the common names. I set up an "info" email address. Bad move, instant target. It gets at least 50 emails a day and I'm lucky if 1 in 100 is not spam. Who knew that the info's of the world would make such a good market for male enhancement products and fake watches, but that's what it receives.

Some of it is confounding too. My ISP allows me to have up to 8 email addresses. So I set up an extra. A couple days later I logged in to configure it and I had emails waiting. Without ever sending an email from that address, it was getting spammed. The address must have gotten onto some searchable list somewhere. Not only was it getting spam emails, but it was getting "undeliverable mail" responses. Someone was using that new address as the "from:" or "reply to:" address in spams to other people. Now that's just criminal. Fed up, I enabled the vacation feature so that any email to that address automatically gets responded to with a message saying it is an autoreply, spam is evil and that emails to this account will never be seen by a person.

Despicable advertisers ... just when you think it can't get worse someone figures out a new way to get in your face with unwanted advertising. And they wonder why we get ruder...