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As long as people open spam we will have spam

When university studies report that people still open and respond to 10-15% of SPAM sent, it is a gold mind for these crooks. Remove the 15% stupid people and the problem solved.

Can’t do that you say. We live in a free society and have the right to be stupid. Well then, the remaining 85% must continue to suffer.

Don’t look to industry to solve the problem. There isn’t enough money in it. Besides, industry is too slow. As soon as they develop a filter the crooks develop a workaround before the product hits the shelves. The crooks share their knowledge. Industry fights to keep all its knowledge away from competitors. Who do you think wins?

I’ve had the same free Hotmail account since late 1999. In over seven years of use, most people would have an average of 100’s of spam emails/day. I get, at most, 10 pieces of junk mail per WEEK. I manage my email account correctly. If I sign up for some newletter or use my email account to register for some website or anything else that usually causes an increase in spam, I am diligent about using the unsubscribe links that come with most spam emails. For those annoying ones that slip through without an unsubscribe option or one that doesn’t work, I simply block that sender and/or domain.

It’s not rocket science and it’s far easier to unsubscribe to a few emails per day here and there, than to run around blaming ISP’s, email programs for lousy filters and everyone else under the sun for a problem that ultimately is your own.

Just my two cents.

Tom and Mike , thanks for the comments. I do think you should know a couple of things however. First, the e-mail account I refer to is a Hotmail account, and when I say junk mail, Mike, you should remember that the junk mail tally is not upped in the junk mail counter if the mail IS OPENED. So when I say it reamins at about 300-500 per day, that means that, since Hotmail deletes the junk every 48 hours, 300-500 is where it stays because that is how many pieces of mail is rejected WITHOUT OPENING. Tom, you’re right, the industry will not solve it, they created it, THERE’S the rub.

As for diligently removing spam by replying to unsubscribe lists, that would be nice, but about the first of the year I signed up for an AOL account [so I could share files through a system they offer for free]. I have never given that address to a single person…I thought perhaps I could keep the spam down that way…it gets between 90 and 130 pieces of spam each week, which I simply remove without ever looking at even the titles. Since I did not subscribe, there should be nothing to unsubscribe to. It returns each week, like the proverbial bad penny.

First of all I’m amazed to read that Mike’s actually been able to stem the tide of junk mail via the “unsubscribe” links that accompany some spam offerings. Conventional wisdom has it that such links only get you deeper into the briar patch, which always made sense to me since anyone self-serving enough to assail you with unsolicited crap in the first place is disinclined to facilitate ridding yourself of it in the second. “Oh, so ya wanna unsubscribe from my spam–do ya?” (I envision them saying). “I gotch ya ‘unsubscribe’ right heah” (grabbing at crotch wise-guy style). Anyway, I’ve never utilized such links so I have no experience with how effective they are.

The following suggestion won’t work for anyone married to their current email address since it’s closing the barn door after the horse has gone, but it’s worked perfectly for me in the six months since I switched to DSL and was forced to change mine; i.e., not one piece of spam so far…

I believe the tip came from this very newsletter, in fact: DISPOSABLE EMAIL ADDRESSES. I “favorited” three of them: “10 Minute Mail” http://www.10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html, “SpamBob” http://spambob.com/ and “spamgourmet” http://www.spamgourmet.com/ (each having its own characteristics) but I’ve made the most extensive use of spamgourmet–adding my own twist to the addresses I devise. Here’s an address I created when I signed up for TV Guide online: tvguide01.3.yournamehere@spamgourmet.com (where “yournamehere” was my actual email address, less ISP/domain). The reason for prefixing the address with the name of the company being dealt with is obvious: if I get a piece of junk mail so prefixed I know who sold me out and I know NEVER to give them my real email address. “3″ is the number of emails they can send you (delivered to your true email address via spamgourmet) before the contrived address expires. I add the “01″ (i.e., nn) at the end of the company’s name in case (in this case) they use up their three emails with spam and I ever need to give them another email address–in which case I would limit their emails to me to 1-only, which would be tvguide02.1.yournamehere@spamgourmet.com.

For the little extra work it’s worth not having to weed through an Inbox full of garbage, some of which is inevitably infected. (A few years ago I got an infected email before my antivirus guys discovered it, so only due diligence prevented infection of my system.) It’s also very gratifying, being able to deprive spammers of another pigeon.

Finally, even if legislation was considered an option to stop spammers I doubt that it would work. As I’ve written here elsewhere recently: the FTC can’t even make their National Do Not Call Registry work to stop solicitors from cold-calling, doing nothing more than maintaining a database of offenders. If the government can’t stop easily identifiable telephone offenders operating out in the open how would they ever presume to stop ones hiding under virtual rocks? Besides, as theoracle has intimated: they’re already too busy trying to run everything else.

PS: It occurred to me some time ago that, increasingly, our government is disinclined to do ANYTHING that inhibits commerce, since it gets its share of the spoils no matter what. This includes sales induced by spam, the FTC’s escalating failure to act in a timely manner against companies like Enron, and those selling products KNOWN to be worthless (I’m thinking of a particular “male enhancement” product sold on television, accompanied by whistling–exposéd on Dateline several years ago) and the failure of legislators and law enforcement to be more involved in stopping identity theft. In this last case, for example, taxes will be collected for items purchased by the identity thief while the victim languishes with virtually no help from the government or local law enforcement to stop it. Then whatever steps the victim takes to rectify the problem himself is worth even more money to the government via taxes on private investigator and attorney’s fees, etc. Like a stock broker who can’t lose either way, the government “wins” whenever money changes hands.