The scourge of spam

I know this problem isn't unique to me, pretty much everyone in the world with an email address experiences the annoyance of spam--what they call unsolicited commercial email. I was listening to a story about it on NPR yesterday on the way to work, talking about proposed laws to combat it, and it got me to thinking about it again, wondering how it can ever be controlled. The major problem in combatting it is, I guess, that it's basically free to the sender.

It costs no more to send a million emails than it costs to send one, so hey, why not? Even if you only get one sucker, since you didn't spend anything to send your message, even one is profit, right?

Marketing types oppose any kind of legislation, of course, and say that any control would be stepping on their Constitutional right to free speech. And every time they start talking about it, I try to equate it with junk mail, which we all get, too, and try to think, well, it isn't so bad, I guess. But it is. And you just can't compare it to junk mail--I probably get, at most, 5 or 6 pieces of junk mail a day. If I added up all of my email accounts, I probably get around 450 pieces of junk email per day.

I have an AOL account that I don't use (Bob uses the AOL account, I just have a sign-on); the only reason I sign on is to empty my mailbox, which collects around fifty messages a day. That address has never been published anywhere, and I've never used it, yet it fills with spam on a regular basis. I try to sign on about once a week to empty it, and it always has around 200 to 300 messages in it.

I have a Yahoo! Mail account that I use to collect my personal mail when I'm away from my home computer; that address gets around 200 pieces of spam a day.

And my regular account gets about 150 spam messages per day; I go up to bed with an empty mailbox, and come downstairs in the morning to find over a hundred messages have arrived overnight. I look carefully at the subjects and senders, because I don't want to accidentally delete something that I actually want, but most mornings I end up with only one or two real emails. I have filters on Outlook, but the spammers are savvy to them, and have figured out that if you've filtered out "viagra," you might not have filtered "v.i.a.g.r.a." Now, it seems to me that if you didn't want to read emails about "viagra," you might not be at all interested in it, no matter how it's spelled, but I guess they get points for persistence.

Just for the record, I don't want to stuff envelopes at home (even if I can earn $2000/week doing it), chat with singles in my city, enlarge my penis, increase sales, start accepting credit cards, lose 30 pounds in 30 days, or look younger. I don't want to increase my breast size, refinance my mortgage, buy ink cartridges or earn a college degree online. I don't need a new cell phone, a new car, stock tips or phentermine, and I don't want to find out how to make a fortune on Ebay. I don't want patriotic coins, t-shirts, chain letters or jelly beans, and I don't want a subscription to Time magazine, a pasta pot (amazing or otherwise) or Gevalia coffee. I don't want to talk to my computer rather than typing, I don't need to stimulate my love life, and I don't want to spy on anyone. I don't want tax-free cigarettes, free audio books, free DVDs, a free digital camera, or even a free PDA. I don't want a percentage of some exiled prince's Nigerian fortune. I don't need someone to submit my site to search engines. And hey! Here's one I haven't seen before: "Call me immediately. We want to feature your product on our television show." Huh. I wonder what product that would be? Maybe I should call them . . . Nah.

I just want them to leave me alone.

I know that most of the AOL mail is just random, and I've given the Yahoo address for a lot of things that I didn't want to give my real address, so it's obviously going to be a magnet for spam, but by the quantity and quality of spam I get at my regular address, I'm positive it's has been sold and now appears on one or more of those "1 million email addresses!" CDs that they're always trying to get me to buy.

I've thought of changing my address, but that wouldn't help, since I'm the sole contact for my domain. Anything that comes in addressed to that domain comes to me, and I've searched my host's site and there doesn't seem to be any way to reject addresses that don't exist, since I'm on a shared server.

So I just keep editing my filters and hoping for the best.