Spam is out of control! I guess that would be the understatement of the year. Like any other annoying fact of life, you let it drive you crazy or you deal with it. In the age of cyber communication, "Spam" has become the main way to get the message out to the masses. But if you think about it, I guess "spam" has always been with us. Before the Internet, when it came in our mailbox, we called it "junk mail". On TV, we call it an "infomercial". Over the telephone, it's "telemarketing. The determined marketer will always find an annoying way to try to get his message to the people, whether they want it or not. But to me those other methods always seemed more controllable. "Junk mail", a quick look and chuck it in the trash. I guess it was a lesser volume of mail because the advertiser was paying for it? You know, postage and real paper. The TV "infomercial", just turn off the Telly or change the channel. This form of bombardment is costly to the advertiser also. Now "telemarketing" is a whole other animal. It doesn't seem to matter what the cost to the advertiser is, the return is greater. The deterrents, like the national "don't call me" doesn't really work. My solution. Caller ID and don't answer the phone if no name and/or phone number comes up. Oh yea! and an answering machine to catch the strays is helpful. As an Internet marketer, with a web site, I get upwards of 500 emails in my inbox daily. What used to take minutes to sift through them now takes me hours. When I am done and close my email client, a little window pops up and asks me if I am sure I want to delete the 450 emails in the trash? Over 450 of the approximately 500 emails I get daily are trash. That's ludicrous! You might say to yourself, why doesn't he use a spam filtering program to get rid of the spam? Well so far all the spam filter software I have tried seems to throw out the baby with the bath water. I would rather trust my own internal spam filter, called common sense; and the "delete" key to get the job done. None of the filters I have tried, no matter how fine tuned, doesn't throw out the good email with the bad. In fact they are so fine tuned, that in trying to out smart the spammer they include many legitimate words or phrases in their list of no-no's. So you still have to scan it. The spam filters are even contributing to the amount of emails we get. Many legitimate Internet marketers have resorted to sending out a second email in case a spam filter stopped their first email from reaching you. In fact, just mentioning the word "spam" in this article would probably keep it from being read by millions of people. So what can we do about it? If I had a definitive answer to that question, I probably would get the Nobel Prize for Solving an Annoying World Problem. Do they have a Nobel Prize for solving an annoying world problem? Anyway. Here is my humble offering in an attempt to rid the world of this cursed menace! The best way, of course, would be not to buy any product or service offered by a spammer. If they don't make any money as a result of their spamming, they eventually will get the message and stop. However, this solution would have to be undertaken on a global scale to be effective and there must be plenty of people who are reading and acting on the spammer's message to prevent this from happening. Although I can't for the life of me figure out why! Another solution that you and I, as individuals, can do is delete the email and more importantly not buy from the spammer. Like trashing "junk mail", turning off the "informercial" on TV or not answering the phone when it's a "telemarketer". You can take an individual stand. Like the great actor Peter Finch, in his Oscar winning performance in Network (1976), tell the world your "mad as hell and your not going to take it anymore!" |
