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I Hate spam

spam — the bane of email.  First, please notice that I did not capitalize "spam."  "Spam" is a trademark of Hormel Foods Corporation and is the name of its chipped ham luncheon meat.  "spam" is a term for unsolicited, commercial email.  Unsolicited — you didn't ask for it.   Commercial — it is selling something.  Email — you know, letters from the Internet.

I used to hate junk mail.  Seems like I got 2 or 3 different envelopes in the mail each day wanting to get me to buy this, subscribe to that, win this free car, or whatever.  Now, I almost like junk mail — at least it cost someone to print and mail the stuff.

spam, on the other hand, is tremendously cheap to send.  spammers make their money by volume.  A spammer might send a couple million emails advertising mortgages.  If one recipient in ten thousand uses the spam to get a mortgage, the spammer may make 200 times a $50 referral fee ($10,000) or more.  What did it cost him?  A temporary email account at any of a number of ISP's, perhaps even "charged" on a fake credit card.  Or, he might be using some of the thousands of subverted home computers, whose innocent owners know nothing of this, to send it for him.

[Moral:  Keep your antivirus installed and up to date.  Run Ad-Aware, Spybot Search & Destroy, Microsoft Antispyware or CounterSpy to keep your computer clean!  For more information.]

spam — whether it is selling pills, mortgages, plane tickets, or personal body enhancers — whatever it is selling, it makes up the majority of the email on the Internet and we're getting tired of it.

What's the most effective thing we can do to stop spam?  As individuals, simply, we must not open spam emails, preferably not even look at them in a preview panel.  As a community of Internet users, the most effective thing we can do is to drive these folks out of business by not even looking at their offers, certainly we should not accept their offers.

The Feds tried last year with the "CAN-SPAM" act.  Guess what?  "CAN" has two meanings.  Hopefully, they meant "CAN" as in trash can.  Unfortunately, they put in too many holes (let's not even discuss why those holes were added), so "CAN" means "are able to."  

Holes? Yes, holes.  There is one big critical one.  Anyone can legally send spam to anyone else once as long as they put in some particular required information and provide an ability to un-subscribe from subsequent emails, preferably by a link in the email.  The law requires you to "opt-out" of future spams from that sender.  But, if the spammer has any business relationship with the spamee, the spammee is fair game.

Of course, what's the first thing you were told about spam?  You were told "NEVER CLICK on the unsubscribe" link.  That's because, if you confirm that there really is a person at that email, that simple knowledge makes the address more valuable to a spammer.  spammers sell email lists to each other, and "confirmed addresses" get higher prices.

The second big hole is that the act pre-empted any State law that attempts to control spam.  As a result, states like Virginia, who took a lead in anti-spam legislation, are out of the anti-spam enforcement game again.

If you want to give Congress a little push, write your favorite Congressman and tell him or her that you want a better anti-spam act than the "CAN-SPAM" act.  Maybe Congress will understand this time.

It is really up to us, the Internet email users, to put spammers out of business.  If you don't like spam, do not ever buy a product advertised by spam.  Don't respond to the ad, don't go to the website, just delete the email and ignore it.

If you want to contact your Senator or Congressman on any other issue, the easiest way to find them is via house.gov and senate.gov.  For the House of Representatives, the directory of members is http://clerk.house.gov/members/index.html.  For the Senate, it is http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.  How did I find these web pages?  Google, of course.

Want to block spam from your account? Check out the free trials of Mailwasher Pro and/or iHateSpam.

Link to this page — just add this code to your web page!

<a href="http://www.terryscomputertips.com/computers/i-hate-spam.php">I Hate spam</a>

Copyright © 2005-2006 Terry A. Stockdale. All rights reserved.