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Okay, consider this my “rant-of-the-day”
Does anyone ever open their mailbox only to find:
1/2 Price Cigarettes!
Bigger Pe…well you know..
etc..etc…
And ever think to themselves…sure I would like half priced cigarettes! But I’d never order it from a spam email.
Or sure, I’d love a longer ermmmm member… but I’d never order it from spam email.
Which brings up my question: Who the hell would ever order anything from a spam email anyway? Regardless if it was 5 dollar tickets to Spain, or a 10 dollar trip to the moon, I’d never use it period.
And so now I’m curious, have any of you ever once replied or took interest in a spam e-mail? Or has anyone you’ve ever known answered one? I’m guessing a big “no”.
Which brings up the even bigger point (Pun intended): If no one is buying these things, why the heck do they keep doing ’em? I can’t agree with sending them to prison for multiple years (which happened earlier this month) for simply being an annoyance. But what is the point if you’re not making any money?
Since yesterday evening I’ve received 870 emails. I have a vicious spam filter that filtered out 822 of them, leaving 48 in my inbox. Of the 48 ALL were spam!
No matter how much I fiddle around with the spam filter there is always some that get through. most are insidious, with subjects like “Hey, my new address is…” and you open it to get a “never pay full price for software again” spam.
Email is the bane of my life 🙁
Apparently, people do respond to them, although most of the people I know aren’t idiots so I don’t know anyone personally who has (except almost a decade ago when someone was trying to get Cyberpromo’s actual physical address to complain).
It only takes pennies to send a million emails a day. It also only takes one sucker or novice to buy something and ruin it for the rest of us.
More importantly, it’s not the spammers themselves who believe they will get a response. They don’t care. They make their money off of people who believe people will respond to spam advertising by selling addresses they harvest from forwarded jokes, newsgroups and guestbooks and sales from online services who claim they will not sell addresses if you sign up for something.
As a domain registrant I can make all non-specific email get forwarded to one email address if it doesn’t really exist, so every time I sign up for an online service or order something or register a piece of software, I make up an address named after the company I’m dealing with. This way I can track who sells my address and refuse to do business with them in the future.
I’ve also had to block all common domain addresses like: admin@, sales@, info@, webmaster@ because the spammers put those into their lists automatically when they find a new domain. My webmaster address is always the name of an actress who has worked with Patrick McGoohan, and it changes to a new one every time a spammer picks it up.
I do believe in jail time for spammers who send porn email to minors, or who send porn email without checking to see if someone is a minor, or for sending ads for something that is clearly misleading or untrue or claims to be something its not like a Microsoft critical update or a note from a friend (which is illegal anyway, spam or not), but just for sending spam itself I think there should be a fine of double the profits made and community service picking up trash on the highway.
(And maybe a public stoning for those ads that ask if I want a V!a9r@ for my Pen15.)
Pet
BTW: 11 executives of the Direct Marketing Association who are still fighting the National No-call telemarketing list signed up for it! Hmmm….
I have had several episodes where I was blocking an offending address and somehow blocked one I wanted…. arrrghhh…. and you don’t realize right away. Spammers should be sliced, fried and fed to hungry dogs.
Delete…
Delete…
Delete…
Delete…I only read the creative ones, but never open any attatchments, that’s just foolish. 😉
Besides, it’s always fun thinking that you’re the only person in the world that some woman you never met can trust millions of dollars with because she is oppressed somewhere and needs to escape. Seeing how all you need to do is send bank account information, who could refuse? 😛
And then there are the fun ones where people pretend that they sent it to the accidental person with topless pictures, or other crap like that. Also, I absolutely love the one’s that invade your mail and send you one that’s almost an exact duplicate, but has an evil attatchment on it. I usually get those through my school system, which has more holes in it than… well, I’m crap at finishing sentences like that.
Fortunately, I rarely use e-mail, so I don’t get too much spam. I hate e-mail, I find it absolutely pointless.
I had a good one yesterday.
‘If you’ve received this e-mail, your spam filter is no good, get a better one here’Almost as good as the person who knocked on my door and tried to sell me a ‘No hawkers’ sign.
My personal email address has been spam free for about 5 years but that’s only cos I sign up for very little – like here, a daily dilbert comic and Bill Bailey’s newsletter. That’s it.
My dad’s email got out somehow though…and it’s a nightmare. When you open up the email it get about 90 messages and they’re all spam. We did have a spam filter at one point but it kept deleteing ebay messages (real ones….not the “please put in your credit card number and pin number ones!).
If anyone here reads the Fortean Times, there is an article this month on a guy who thinks aliens are trying to contact us through spam 😯 . Why they want to attract us with “You won’t BELIEVE what these girls do!!!!!!!!!!!!” kind of messages nobody knows. 😕
Sorry for length (I think that appeared in an email too… 😉 )
Bambooshoot 😀
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