Report Spam And Help Save The World

When the great Monty Python sang about liking ham and jam and spamalot little did they know of the negative connotations that last word would realize decades later. Literally billions of pieces of spam either electronic or the traditional paper type are circulating at any one point in time. Some of it is malicious, some plain annoying and most at the very best, a waste of time and energy for the receivers

Currently I get about 10 pieces of junk mail per day in my letterbox. (Note to the worst culprit American Express: Go away, I don’t want your card and even if I did I would rather cut my own spleen out with a butter knife than give you my business) Every single one has been going straight into the trash unopened. I used to take out the return envelopes and gleefully (and somewhat childishly I admit) send them back empty and hope that would help companies realize that this simply wasn’t worth the expense. Of course the percentages we are talking about and the billions of pieces of junk that we receive every year meant I was attempting something akin to emptying an Olympic swimming pool with a sieve. So I gave that up and decided to just dump the stuff. The problem now is that I have twice inadvertently thrown away legitimate mail from my bank and it almost cost me $35 for an unpaid bill that I never saw. So I am back to dealing with this garbage and wasting 3 or 4 minutes of my day, or should I say, having 3 or 4 minutes of my day stolen?

E-mail spam is an altogether more sinister matter. Over the last 24 hours I reckon that I have received over 100 pieces of spam and I have now reluctantly taken the decision to close a number of my mail boxes down which makes me feel kind of defeated but nothing else I do is working so I have to deal with it somehow.

The people I really blame for all this are not really the spammers (although I do dislike them with a passion normally reserved for tourists that insists on turning left from the right hand lane on the I4) but the people that actually open and respond to this stuff! Don’t do it people! They rely on tiny fractions of recipients acting on this BS and every time you open an e-mail and respond you are fueling the fire and making it a worthwhile exercise for them and harder work for everybody else.

In fact go further and report them:

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/spam/report.html

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