Re: ARGH! Please make it STOP!

>
> Just curious, Scott - do you take the same stance with regard to those card
> packs that come in the mail? They are often "unsolicited". Do you refuse to
> do business with any company that has a card in the pack?
>

I receive one of those card packs every 6-9 months.   When they come,
they're placed in my inbox, and I get to reading them just "whenever".
Or, I can just toss them.

Spam, I receive every 10-15 minutes.   I can't ignore them because people
use it to report computer problems, and it's my job is to fix those
problems immediately.  I must, at least, read the topics.

Telephone calls are a better analogy than postal mail (for me) because
they interrupt what I'm working on.   If I received a telephone call every
10-15 minutes, sometimes in another language, often selling viagra/penis
enlargement/mortgages/spyware I would be even more angry about it than I am
about spam.

But, at the most, I get 2-3 telephone calls per day from salespeople, and
they at least pertain to my life in some way.  I still get annoyed by
telemarketers, but not to the extent that I get annoyed by spam.

> The Internet poses many challenges, especially by the ease of access it
> affords in all directions.

That's the problem.   It's easy for a completely unrelated company
anywhere in the world to send out millions of spam messages.  If only
one out of 1000 people responds, then it's profitable.

As long as it continues to be profitable, they'll continue to do it.
They don't care that 99.9% of the recipients are (to varying degrees)
annoyed with them.  People's feelings don't matter.  Only money matters.

>
> I do not say you are right or wrong here. I don't take the stance to the
> degree you do. I try to find effective tools (MailWasher has been pretty
> good, though it has a few problems). I also do not want to hinder those
> doing legitimate business (how do we identify legitimate?)

I use SpamAssassin.   That's why I'm getting it only every 10-15 minutes
instead of 5-10 minutes.