I reckon most of us feel there’s no lower form of life than spam merchants. No one is immune from spam and some of us are driven crazy by it. Even the mildest of us can happily contemplate the severest penalties for such people. Lynching and public disembowelment come to mind.
And yet, what do they do to us that is so terrible? All they do is send us unwanted information and what is so awful about that? All we need do is trash it. Yes. yes, I know they fill up our in-boxes and some sell pornography. But why do we become so incensed, when we can just ignore it and trash it?
In my case I think the main reason I can get so exercised getting spammed could be as simple as I’m in a bad mood and being electronically interfered with by these guys can send me stratospheric. How dare they! And worse, the feeling that someone’s got your number, anything you do to retaliate can only make it worse. They understand the internet and how it works, and I do not. I am powerless. I want to kill them, or at very least destroy their businesses with spam for an infinity. I yearn to return a thousandfold what they are doing to me, but there’s not a dam‚ thing I can do.
Compared to some people, I reckon I’ve probably had it pretty easy. Not a lot of spam finds its way to my private address, mostly it comes to me via Yahoo. Even this hasn’t been as bad as I gather happens to some folks.
I’ve had a spate of gobbledygook (forgive the unintended pun), nonsense interspersed with a lot of exclamation and other punctuation marks. This I learned usually came from Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese sources. After dutifully reporting it to Yahoo as spam for about a year it finally stopped coming. Of course I get my share of the viagra-type ads and offers to enlarge my member. Such impertinence! How do they know the size of my member? Then I started getting a spate of the Nigerian con merchants who’ve now graduated to the internet and have sort of cleaned up their English language a bit. I wrote back to one to say I was very interested in the deal they outlined but unfortunately I was tied up in meetings at the Fed with Alan Greenspan right now but I would be sending my daughter to represent me and to meet them. She would be arriving in Lagos by British Airways flight BA 727 on such and such a date and time bringing US$35,000 in cash as earnest of good faith. They couldn’t possibly fail to recognise her as she was 22, blonde and very good looking and I knew I could rely on them to take good care of her....
Now however I’m being plagued by unsolicited rubbish from a local Bali outfit we shall call SpamHosting. For 3 months now these have been coming thick and fast on a daily basis with gathering velocity and volume. It really started to get under my skin, particularly since I’m stuck here in Los Angeles and only have my Yahoo address for communication. I asked my assistant back in Bali to fix it, but she refused on the grounds that it would only infect our office address and/or her personal address. Smart girl. Eventually, in some trepidation (all the while damning them to Hellfire for all eternity) I sent an ever so politely-worded message asking them to remove me from their mailing list, only to get a very rude message back from some twerp who thought it was I who was sending him the stuff. Figuring I could do this with impunity I soon put him right, I can tell you. Only to get a plaintive reply from somebody else entirely who said “Yes, wasn’t it awful, and he too was being persecuted by SpamHosting.”
My heart sank. What had I done? Every communication I had sent to these people was now going to grow exponentially until my mail box was permanently and irretrievably blocked. In desperation I went back to last SpamHosting message and clicked on what in my bad Indonesian I thought (hoped) might be a removal mechanism. I then got an e.mail from SpamHosting itself to say I could remove myself from their list by sending an e.mail to another address. Fearing the worst I did as suggested and got an acknowledgement, which was then followed by another e.mail to ask “did I really really want to removed?”. YES! YES! PLEASE, I DO, I DO....I wrote back.
And there the matter lies for now. Can this really be the end of my persecution by these benighted dolts thrusting their unwanted data down my electronic maw? Dare I, can I hope it may be so...?
The more I think about it the more saddened I am that Bali’s computer literate youth should be wasting their time in such a way, quite apart from plaguing the likes of myself. They should put their talents to much better use. If SpamHosting is not a spam merchant but just an over-enthusiastic talking shop/forum, as I hope is the case, I am hoping that I have heard the last of them.
If that is too fond a hope, is there not out there some internet maven who can marshal the Forces of the Righteous so we can zap SpamHosting back into the stone age and collapse their site? Please say there is.....
