Spam

After a recent post by A., I decided to cease deleting spam messages to my gmail account (which bordered on an OCD compulsion) and just really see how many I get per day...and more precisely in a week. I began this just before midnight on Friday exactly a week ago. I have started typing this just before midnight this Friday. At this very moment I have 335 messages in my spam box on gmail. Easily 90% of them involve Viagra, Cialis, and\or some other form of male performance or size enhancement. The remaining 10% involve drugs (prescription) in general, software, or just outright porn solicitations.

The biggest thing I am left to truly wonder is what kind of moron actually responds to these kind advertisements to make them profitable and\or worthwhile to continue to be such a nuisance and so frequent in occurrence. I have to assume that people do actually respond to them for the nuisance to continue.

I personally have always had an extreme hatred of junk mail, telemarketing, and spam. I have never returned a telemarketing call and have always cut short anyone I had the misfortune of picking up to hear the beginning of their pitch. I have returned some junk mail at times with coupons from another source just to know that they paid for the return mail as well.

While bemoaning telemarketing calls in the past before the "do not call" list, I was shocked and finally understood the motivation to find out that it was a multi-billion dollar a year business for companies that engaged in that kind of supreme annoyance. No wonder they are so persistent and willing to lose money on the likes of me.

The sad thing is that particularly in the case of spam there is a very real cost to the victim associated with the reality of trying to block this waste of human potential both in bandwidth requirements and temporary storage which is also projected into the billions globally.

In my former company of nearly 25,000 email users, roughly 1 million spam messages per month were blocked (which carries a distinct cost both in mail performance and software to perform the check)....and we still got a sad amount of SPAM to waste storage space.