I do. Really. It annoys me to get unsolicited commercial email, largely because those sending it know perfectly well that most people do not want to receive it! They harvest the email addresses of people (like myself) who would never, ever sign up for their mailing lists. They also send out emails to addresses that might or might not be valid on well-known domains (using lists of common names and words), creating an unnecessary load on the receiving domains’ incoming mail servers. They either refuse to remove addresses from their lists when requested, say they’ve removed them but don’t, or remove the name from their list but leave it on lists they then sell to other spammers. They go to great lengths to obscure the actual origin of their messages because they know that many recipients will complain.
This is quite unlike those who send most of the junk mail I receive at my physical address, who will stop sending it if requested to do so — but then, it costs them money to send out each piece of junk mail. It costs so little to send out bulk emails that the senders don’t care how many people don’t want it. I’ve never received a piece of sexually explicit junk mail, much less had any arrive addressed to one of the kids in our household. Spammers happily send pornographic spam out to children every day. In short, I think spammers are scum who heartily deserve to be permanently removed from the internet and denied access to all the wonderful resources it offers.
Yes, that was a rant.
My strong feelings on this subject led to being stalked by one spammer. I still hold those feelings and will continue to fight unsolicited commercial emails and inappropriate commercial posts on Usenet despite that harassment. His behavior is not, fortunately, typical of spammers, but other people have been harassed in various ways by spammers looking for revenge. One of this creep’s tricks has been to reply to spam he receives using my email address so that I’ll receive mail from that spammer in the future (I found out when some of his messages bounced back to me). If someone starts doing that to you as well, you’ll have a much harder time getting rid of the spam–but don’t give up!
This page had grown unreasonably long, so I’ve split it up.
Last updated 25 October 2001
Photo by Onlineprinters on Unsplash