SPAM - Can’t live with it, can’ find the FU@$ERS to kill them!
Everyone who’s ever used Email in their life has had to deal with SPAM. Some more than others. We’ve all learned that giving our Email address to unscrupulous online merchants can leave you showered with Penis Enlarger Ads or requests to launder some money for an ousted Dictator. What can you do????
In the long run, for now, the best you could possibly hope for is to minimize your exposure because NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY, someone you know, someone who had YOU in THEIR contacts list is going to open someone else’s SPAM message, infect their machine with a virus and have EVERY SINGLE CONTACT STRIPPED OUT like my Aunt Ruth sucking the marrow from bone. Sluuuuuuuuuuuurp, done!
MAYBE use a SPAM filter. Good for some, bad for others. None are perfect and many take up more of your time that just killing the SPAM messages in your inbox. Just remember though, not everyone uses their Email in the same way so some of these may be the perfect match for you, a godsend you might say. Me personally? I have yet to find one that isn’t more of a pain than what it’s trying to cure but I’m a bit more odd than others.
DO use free 3rd party Email programs (Yahoo, Hotmail, Google) to communicate with cataloges, merchants and any online transactions.
DON”T give out your primary Email address to any commercial entity. Yes Virginia, even the “scrupulous” vendors find the profit of reselling your addresses too hard to resist.
DON’T ever, EVER (No, really EVER!!!) respond to a SPAM message which offers to “take you off the list”. If you do I bet you could hear them sporting wood if you listen carefully enough! By doing this you’ve taken your name off of the “could still be a good address” list and immediately moved it to “VALID, VALID, HIT ‘EM NOW” list which trades for more money and trades much more often. You might as well paint glow-in-the-dark Bull’s Eye on your forhead.
Funny Story. I once took it upon myself to try and go after SPAMMers by targeting the ISP’s and Companies they used as senders. After about a year of very diligent work, tracking addresses, checking open relays, and rooting around to find responsible parties I’d have to say that about 0.001% of it worked. Even when (this was a few years back) the content was HIGHLY objectionable, no one gave two sh#@s. I even tried to get my Local, State, Federal officials (You know, the people who we elected to work for “us”) to get involved. I was completely ignored. I even had several cases involving what appear to be SPAM featuring child pornography and I couldn’t get ANY legal authority to give me the time of day. And, after all of this work, what did I get? I was put on EVERY G@D DAMNED SPAM list in existence. Holly Hanna did I get SPAMed. I still keep that account active today just to peek at it from time to time as a reminder.
DO (yes, this is the biggest pain in the ass) change your Email address from time to time. Nothing works better than changing your address. DO NOT CHANGE IT AND THEN FORWARD ALL YOU EMAIL! This will accomplish nothing. However, that being said, you can do this for a short period of time to make sure you let all your friends know but you really need to kill it sooner than later.
The absolute, 100%, never get SPAM, only get the Email you want method? Yeah, I thought that was a hoot too!
