My spam file is growing again.
A few months ago I was getting roughly 500 spams a day. Now it’s closer to 700.
The news on the spam front is bad as well. A spammer won a declarative judgement against the leading anti-spam activist, Spamhaus, because Spamhaus refused to pay for a lawyer and contest the suit. The FTC continues to enforce a phony "CAN-SPAM" law that defines a lot of things I consider spam as non-spam, so my gmail box, for instance, keeps filling up with Amazon spam since I have bought stuff from them.
It’s a bother, but not enough of a bother that I change my e-mail address or put any speedbumps (answer this question, prove you’re not a robot) between myself and my correspondents.
Instead, I use Mailwasher.
Actually I use the paid, pro version of Mailwasher, which lets me deal with multiple e-mail boxes at once.
More important, Mailwasher lets me define spam. It ranks messages based
on how likely they are to be spam, but lets me bounce and delete any
other message I choose.
- Did Apple (or some other vendor) stick you on a mailing list
because you failed to uncheck a box? Add them to your personal
blacklist. - Did a friend piss you off beyond living endurance? Put them on your personal blacklist.
- Is someone getting foreign language spam through by spoofing your e-mail address as the sender? Delete ’em at a click.
There are times when a spam gets through. It may hit my inbox in the
moments between my deleting my spam and going to my e-mail program to
receive mail. But we’re talking here of just a few messages at a time
— easily dealt with.
But the most important feature here is who defines spam with
Mailwasher. With Mailwasher, you define spam. Not the government. Not
the sender. You.
Now that’s what I call freedom.
I wish companies like Amazon and eBay would learn that quality is more important than quantity. Instead of sending me dozens of e-mails a wek about a lot of crap I’m not interested in and instead kept it down to 1 or 2 a month that were more relevant, I’d like them a lot better and they would get more of my money than they already do. Given their intellectual resources, I’d think they could move beyond the brute-force method of marketing.
I wish companies like Amazon and eBay would learn that quality is more important than quantity. Instead of sending me dozens of e-mails a wek about a lot of crap I’m not interested in and instead kept it down to 1 or 2 a month that were more relevant, I’d like them a lot better and they would get more of my money than they already do. Given their intellectual resources, I’d think they could move beyond the brute-force method of marketing.
The real problem is that email costs nothing to send and companies have no real incentive to prune their lists.
I was a member of eLance many years ago. I cancelled my membership and have not been there in years. Every day I get mail from them. I emailed them several times asking to be removed from their list. It’s worse than trying to get AOL to stop hitting your credit card after you cancel. Once eLance has your email address, they email you for eternity.
Mailwasher automatically deletes and bounces their email, but it still comes in every day.
However, imagine what all this “asshole mail” as I call it does to Internet bandwidth and server storage. It consumes huge resources, with no cost. Amazon probably consumes terrabytes of disk storage to hold their junk mail on varios servers. They probably use gigabytes of bandwidth sending it all around. They, of course, pay nothing for all this waste of resources.
On the other hand, we only do that which gets us something. Study after study shows that spam works, because the dummies among us, and they are legion, buy from spam.
So, curse the darkness, but as long as the truly stupid support spam marketing, you’ll be getting junk mail forever.
The real problem is that email costs nothing to send and companies have no real incentive to prune their lists.
I was a member of eLance many years ago. I cancelled my membership and have not been there in years. Every day I get mail from them. I emailed them several times asking to be removed from their list. It’s worse than trying to get AOL to stop hitting your credit card after you cancel. Once eLance has your email address, they email you for eternity.
Mailwasher automatically deletes and bounces their email, but it still comes in every day.
However, imagine what all this “asshole mail” as I call it does to Internet bandwidth and server storage. It consumes huge resources, with no cost. Amazon probably consumes terrabytes of disk storage to hold their junk mail on varios servers. They probably use gigabytes of bandwidth sending it all around. They, of course, pay nothing for all this waste of resources.
On the other hand, we only do that which gets us something. Study after study shows that spam works, because the dummies among us, and they are legion, buy from spam.
So, curse the darkness, but as long as the truly stupid support spam marketing, you’ll be getting junk mail forever.