One of my regular visitors, treespotter, left an observation on my last post that I thought deserved a more in-depth reflection than the Comments box:
treespotter Says:
i’m leaving my gmail inbox full (let them purge the 30 days limit), it says around 1050 mails at any one time, but none as smart as any of yours.
i wonder why.
treespotter: I have to sift through a lot of spam to get anything, er, smart (I would give it a different description, more along the lines of, oh, moronic, maybe). It is true that in recent times the ‘quality’ has dropped off rather severely, and I do a great deal more sifting than I used to. No longer are we seeing the likes of the Shakesperean headiness of Hebdomad, The Victorian romping of The Q Word or the outré faux-historical attempts at credibility of Or Use a Cucumber.
Spam itself has become dull and soporific, a great mush of bland trashiness like the brains of those who purvey it. Now I see endless lists of ‘Hi, It Me, [insert random name]!*’ or (in my ‘Comments’ purge list) endless repetitious futile batterings at the Akismet gate, of mind-fogging screens full of plugs for cheap pharmaceuticals.
Let there be no doubt at all – for all my jolly good humour around the subject I truly hate spammers. I hate them with a passion. I ridicule them at every chance I get because I have a distant fond (and yes, I know, futile) hope that, since nothing else seems to work, maybe I might shame them into silence. In idle moments I fantasize about what I might do to one of these despicable specimens of walking excrement if I ever meet one.
Consider these things: by 2007 estimates say that of about 80 billion emails that will be sent, 70% will be spam. That’s over 50 billion spam emails. According to Spamhaus a mere 200 people are responsible for most of this junk, with as few as ten of these cretins accounting for 40% of it.
These 200 small-minded, greedy, pea-brained simpletons are screwing up one of the best ideas ever created; a way for us to have a global mind. These people represent for me the very worst things about humans. They are the kind of people who piss in your swimming pool, who park in the Disabled Persons spaces, who talk in the cinema. They are the kind of people who throw trash out their car window, who push in in queues, who drive Hummers, who peddle child pornography, who poison trees that obscure their view.
In short, they are the kind of people who think of no-one except themselves, and who have no concerns for anything outside their own petty preoccupations with making money.
We put up with spam. It has become a part of our lives. For most people it is a trivial annoyance, maybe a few emails to delete each morning – eh! No big deal. But it is going to get really bad, take my word for it. I’ve been a netizen for longer than most. I remember the Usenet, the early faltering attempts of AOL and when email was exclusively the privilege of those at a University†. I’ve had a net presence and the same email address for long enough to have been added to pretty much every spam list in existence.
So, give it a year or two kids and you’re going to be getting four or five hundred spam emails a day just like I do.
The majority of mine are intercepted in one way or another. My provider allows me to automatically zap about half of them at server level, and of those that get through, a great percentage I can blitz from my smtp account without reading. Even so, I average about fifty junk mails a day that employ tricks crafty enough to get into my mailbox.‡
And in recent times, not content with just filling up the world’s email inboxes with crud, spammers have pissed all over the Comments pages of blogs, creating another level of annoyance and even further wasted time and bandwidth. The sheer puerile mindlessness of these attacks is staggering. Pages and pages and pages of garbage links to sites that no longer exist**, peddling shonky cheap drugs, shitty replica watches and dodgy finance schemes. My daily Akismet purge is like hosing down the footpath outside a pub after a football broadcast.
And you know what? The worst part is that spam works. Not only are there greedy, brain-dead halfwits sending the stuff, there are scores of intellect-challenged dimwits responding to spam emails and even spending their money. All on glittery trash, tacky smut or half-baked swindles.
Stupid, money-grubbing imbeciles peddling garbage to undiscerning covetous dimwits. If they just did it in some back alley where I had no need to travel I wouldn’t care so much.
But the reason I hate spam with such vehemence is that it I am forced to contemplate these jackasses every day in my own life, and every day it is like wading through the sewage of the human condition. It is a constant reminder of how much of a journey we still have to make if we ever hope to become something more than the product of a mindless evolutionary process.
Here endeth today’s lesson.
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*With the egregious missing ”s’ from the ‘It’s’ that makes it instantly identifiable as a piece of crap, an error of colossal carelessness that makes me hate these people even more. For fuck’s sake, if you’re going to try and con someone with such a trivial amount of subterfuge, at least do it properly.
†I even remember the first appearances of spam in my email account and the soiled feeling it left. Like someone had left a turd on my porch.
‡I don’t want to give you the impression that this is particularly crafty. The main ‘trick’ that is used now is simply to make the email look as much like a personal email as possible, and that’s not too hard. The most conniving part is that the spammers actually use other people’s computers to send these messages, which foils attempts to block suspect IP numbers. If you own a PC, there’s a pretty high probability that a spammer lives in your box somewhere and is using it to escape detection.
**These sites are put up for the express purpose of catching people stupid enough to click on the links, but then pulled down as soon as the spammers have raked in enough money from gullible nitwits. The original emails and spamments, however, continue to circulate ad nauseum.
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