By The Way...

This isn't news: Spam has gotten so bad that some people are using e-mail less because of it. The thinking here is that people are worried that their e-mails are just going to be shunted into the spam filter and never heard from again, or that spammers will co-opt their e-mail address to send out messages about gonad enhancers. I'm personally not so worried about the second of these, but just yesterday, a business client of mine (not AOL) had to drag an e-mail of mine out of his spam filter. So the first is a legitimate issue. Also, I think "You E-Mail Must Have Been Eaten By My Spam Filter" is the "My Answering Machine Must Be Broken" for a new generation of people trying to explain why the never bothered to get back to you.

I don't think there's any doubt that e-mail, in a general sense, is broken. I feel it more than most people: Last week I tracked how many pieces of spam I got on my non-AOL e-mail addresses and it came out to more than 3,500, versus just 80 legitimate e-mails. When only one e-mail in 48 is one you really want, it's time something needs to change (My AOL accounts have comparatively little spam, which is a side effect of these addresses not being widely distributed on the net and, I imagine, the company's active spam-filtering processes). One bit of good news here is that the Senate has just passed a piece of fairly stringent anti-spam legislation, by a 97-0 vote, no less, so that's a positive step forward. Of course now it has to get past the House, not to mention scads of lobbyists. And even then, spammers will simply go offshore. Ultimately, solving spam will require changing the technological way people accept and send e-mail.

One mordant side note to this -- spam has spawned a tribute CD, in which indie artists wrote songs whose titles are the subject lines of spam they've gotten in their mailboxes. It's called Outside the Inbox: Songs Inspired by Spam. Very amusing (although, inasmuch as the songs are inspired by spam, you can expect some of them to replicate the content therein. That's a content warning for you). Hopefully I'll never get any spam advertising this particular CD. That'd just be too self-referential.

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• #1 Comment from deanhuns 
  10/23/03 10:44 PM | Permalink

  One of my personal favorites is, I ANSWERED ALL MY SPAM, which was a winner in a spam poetry contest at satirewire.com.
  
  http://www.satirewire.com/features/poetry_spam/01free_winner.shtml