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The Problem with E-mail:
September 16, 2002:
I checked my e-mail this morning as I do every morning. As usual,
there were more that ten e-mails and only two of them were legitimate.
The rest were spam. That is not bad for a business. I know of
some people who get hundreds of unsolicited advertisements each
day. It becomes quite costly in time to deal with them. Unfortunately
spam is impossible to stop. It will remain that way until the
government gets honest enough to pass a real anti-spam law. I
suspect that will happen many years after I die.
It took a very long time to get a law concerning unsolicited fax transmissions. It finally only happened because big business came down on the government through their lobbyists. The rational was that the solicitors were making illegal use of their victims equipment. That is a valid argument and the model would apply equally as well to spam. Unfortunately, in this case, big business is not losing enough money because of spam so it won't happen.
At Wesoomi Publishing we have nine staff functions which require an e-mail address. These become nine places where internet thugs can dump their spam garbage and they do. One of my most persistent spammers is an outfit called Painet. They broadcast a new solicitation about twice each month. When they do they dump it into every mailbox we have at Wesoomi Publishing. That's a bunch of garbage for me to delete. They also include this very pious false message in their solicitation.
"If you wish to be removed from our mailing list, reply to this email with the word REMOVE in the SUBJECT of the email. If you decide to stay on our mailing list, you will only receive emails occasionally, whenever we've added 15,000 or more new images or for special promotions such as this one."
You will notice that this lie attempts to make me responsible for getting rid of their spam. This is not an opt in, it's an opt out. The worst part is that even the opt out is not true. I have sent e-mail to their webmaster twice asking them to stop dumping their garbage into our mailboxes. It had no effect. I don't know why they do that. It should be clear that, even if I needed stock photos, I would never deal with them.
The happy news is, I have found a less time consuming way to eliminate obvious spam. This is good, because most spam is obvious just by looking at the header. That is what I do. The e-mail client I use allows me to view the e-mail headers on the server without downloading the e-mail itself. Then I can mark them delete and/or get (meaning download). In any case I delete the message, but if it's legitimate I also download it. There is a good chance that your e-mail client will let you do the same thing. My criteria are simple.
If it is from someone I know or normally communicate with, I download it.
If it is addressed to editor and the from line is visitor, I download it. This is the way I set up some of my e-mail links on the Wesoomi website.
If I don't know the sender and the to line is undisclosed recipients, I do not download it.
If the from and the to have the same address, I do not download it.
If the from or the to have random characters, I do not download it.
If it has more that 60 blocks, I do not download it. This requires a digression. I don't know why it is, but all of the fools out there who have high speed internet access, assume that everyone else has it also. This is simply not true. At my last check, less that ten percent of American homes have it. It can take several minutes for me to download some of these ridiculously huge files. Most of these are from people who think they are writers. They just dump their entire manuscript on me. Don't ask me why they think that will make me like them. I assure you, it will not.
Finally, if the e-mail is addressed to one of our three Mindspring e-mail addresses, I do not download it unless it is from Mindspring. These three addresses are not used. Their purpose was to set up our Wesoomi e-mail accounts. I have never given them to anyone. There is no way anyone but Mindspring should have them.
When mail comes to these addresses it is automatically redirected to a Wesoomi mailbox. The fact that I receive spam through these addresses can only mean one thing. Some unscrupulous employee of Mindspring/Earthlink has sold these addresses. That is the only way that spammers could get them. About Mindspring, they sold out to Earthlink a few years back. Though Earthlink is the name of the firm, my accounts are still under the Mindspring name.
As editor of Wesoomi Publishing, one of the most frequent solicitations I receive are offers to sell me e-mail lists. Of course, I would never use e-mail that way. I have no good rational for alienating people. I think it is stupid and self defeating. Still, these e-mail lists are compiled and sold on a regular basis. So, of course, there will be unscrupulous insiders who will try to get in on the easy money. There are no safeguards in place that I know of.
If it is any comfort, e-mail lists are not the only things which attract the unscrupulous. When I was gainfully employed, someone in my employer's personnel office sold the entire employee payroll file to an employment (read headhunter) firm. I got solicitations from people who know my name and address, my exact salary, and my exact job definition. Go figure.
As to spam. Learn to deal with it. It is not going to go away.
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