d.e.r.m.a.p.t.h.e.r.a

I hate spammers!

January 8, 2008 at 3:32 pm (Personal) (contactify, spam)

Are you guys tired of getting unwanted spam at least every hour which clutters your mailbox, wasting precious productivity time and YOUR time also?

Well, do you even know how spamming even begin?

If you haven’t noticed, you might have started your own website, blogs, forums, etc… Anything that involves in communicating to the general public.

Then suddenly, you found an interesting message. Though you want the world to contact you. You can’t be posting your mobile number because international calls may apply. You can’t be posting your address, then you’ll end up having stalkers in front of your doors.

So how you remain contactable? You post your email publicly. bogus@thismaildontexist.com. Something like that.

Then in some end of the world, some sneaky smart-ass people design a spider bot. Maybe a marketing bot. Crawls webpages like you’ve never seen before. Their intention is good… They want to improve their marketing strategy, by EMAILING YOU. They know that out of all the emails they gathered, someone is bound to buy their products. Anyway, email is cheap marketing if you ask me.

Since you’re email is as good as naked. Everybody can see it. So they start sending you a mail. If you’re using a web-based email, chances are, those mails will be filtered as junk. Good for you! But it’s as bad also. Because, not all junks are identified as junk. And sometimes, the legitimate ones becomes identified as junk.

So whether you like it or not, you’ll have to check BOTH. Inbox and Junk. Sounds tedious? It’s already happening so too bad…

What you do? You create another email. Then you start your trend all over again. Then spam starts again. Then you’ll have your nightmare started, again.

By the time years goes by, you eventually have like a couple of email addresses which you didn’t even use. And future generations will probably have stupid email names and that are 20 character long, just because you, the selfish one, keeps creating and abusing the attractive emails.

So how can you reduce spam? One way is to make sure you STOP forwarding all those emails. STOP! Email forwardings has to STOP! Forwarding emails has to STOP! STOP!!!

Why? Do you realise that with one forwarded email (assuming if the chain goes on) can collect hundreds of emails at one time? These “mails” are designed in such a way that they encourage people to forward them. The collectively “forwarded” emails will attach older message body to it, thus listing even more emails. These usually end up with catch phrases such as:

• send this to XX people for good luck!
• send this to XX people and the answer will pop out!
• send this to XX people and your wish will come true!
• and the list goes on…

That save’s the spider bot’s ass’s time! More productivity work for them! They can start emailing those 100 emails they collected IN that forwarded mail. Yey! Thanks to you, they don’t have to crawl the web, looking for email addresses. 🙂

Another way is not posting your naked email in public. You should use services like contactify to make you contactable. I just created mine, so you can contact me, via email, here.

I hope, in times to come, people gets more educated. Email spamming is not as bad as a virus, but remember, our time in our life is already short. Having to access every single mail only waste our precious time. So take life seriously. Serious.

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