A few thoughts on this garbage done by people and businesses. Spam is opposite of productive, it is destructive, it kills the internet and it also costs us a ton of money.
You are online, you probably have and use email and you know what is spam. An email message that was not requested, that was not asked for and that has nothing related to you, the recipient. Typically it offers you something to buy, it wants your money, it asks for them, it lies, it pretends it cares And it offers you some service or product you may not need or you have no idea about.
How it got to you? Someone took your email address or stole it or you even gave it to them under different circumstances. People and companies even buy email addresses or they generate them or they steal them from web servers. It’s not complicated, bottom line is they got your email address and they will bother you.
It costs nothing to send email and this is why many companies and businesses use them for money reasons. It’s a business that needs no investment so they have nothing to lose. Spam rarely spreads for any good reasons, mostly for bad reasons. Is it effective? No, almost never from human point of view. If the business gets lucky and sells something thanks to spam, it will always come back to them in negative way. They lose any reputation, they develop no decent credit, no respect, they are often assumed to be the type of indecent criminals.
For business in short term it may be ok. Send million emails, get one new customer, sell them something, make money, and you won because sending million emails cost you zero dollars. And the business obviously does not care about its reputation. If it works, it works for short term. If you mail out million spam emails and get one customer, you also angered 999,999 potential customers, who will do their best to never see you. And they will spread that word.
Companies or spammers know people hate to receive such emails and so they block replies to spams. They will often use fake or invalid email addresses that gets to your To: or Reply: email field when you try to reply. Such email may look like noreply@domain.com or no-reply@domain.com. If they offer their valid email address, they will typically place it within text of its spam message forcing you to read their sales pitch.
Some companies use email that is generated automatically by their software. And they try to make it look as if it is not spam, not automatic, it is supposedly important email very crucial for you to read. Hmmm, right …
You place order with Instacart and buy some food that they will deliver, but they will also send you about 12 emails with confirmations, suggestions to buy something more, notification that they will be late. They also send the same to your phone via text messages. I have recently placed about 30 orders via Instacart. They have been on time twice, 28 times late. I have received a few hundred emails, same amount of text messages. Imagine for example that they have 1 million customers and they all placed similar thirty past orders. Each order on average generates 12 emails (minimum) and 12 text messages. With million customers like me they have sent out 12 million emails and 12 million sms messages.
It costs them nothing, internet is built for email traffic. But just this small example I gave you generated 12 million emails that will be trashed and it costs us all something. Electricity, hardware, network, maintenance, repairs, education, staff, time, etc. It is not completely honest activity, it generates a lot of unnecessary waste of activity and effort and equipment and power. Yes, we’re burning woods, we build nuclear power plants, we burn oil and gas and make air dirty just so someone can send million of spams. There will be time when this will become against the law, it is very difficult to do it, but it would make sense.
Technically speaking if you have a garden in your backyard and grow some flowers, perhaps roses, and it works well, you could go online, collect million email addresses in your nearby area, and send one email to all of them offering homemade grown great roses, just stop by, only $5 a flower. This is legal, it is possible to do it, but it is very inappropriate. When you send million emails, would you be able to serve million roses to million customers? Of course not. But does it cost you anything to send million emails? Not really. What about real mail? It costs money for stamps, envelope, paper. Ok, what about phone calls? Takes money and time, impossible. Then just go door to door? Impossible, I can’t walk around and sell roses, it’s stupid. Yes, perhaps, so why do you hide behind emails? Spam emails?
Similar very negative companies are Google and Amazon. They are large businesses, powerful and rich and they spam on daily basis. And they put a lot of pressure on politicians so spam email will stay legal. They use fake email addresses so you cannot reply and complain. Plus you know them only online, so you can’t really visit their office or shop and complain there. They often make their fake addresses even more complex just to look more official. They worry that email servers detect spam and try to stop it many times and they assume that more complicated email address guarantees that it will arrive. Such example can be
googlecommunityteam-noreply@google.com or
importantnote-noreply@amazon.com
If you want to have some laugh, take a look at the language they type for you. Introduction lately has been mostly
Hey Robert …
so we don’t say good morning or good afternoon, we just say HEY. They employ many smart people, but they often act as idiots. It also depends on what they try to sell, so when they open their spam with HEY, they offer for example alcohol or discounted cheap panties. When they start with HI or HELLO, it will cost you more whatever they try to sell – there will be book or office equipment or paper or software. And when they go to GOOD AFTERNOON or PLEASURE TO MEET YOU, it won’t be cheap, it will be some overpriced jacket or vacation or expensive concert tickets.
Many people try to block such spam and they have their email clients detect them and delete them. They often search for keywords such as NOREPLY or NO-REPLY and they trigger delete function. I would recommend our big spammers not to use fake email just in case they sometimes actually send something useful and really important. Change of password, cancellation of order, perhaps even medical or financial issue. In fact I would recommend that everyone uses only valid email addresses. Email messages are usually considered to be reliable, but doing too much spam will make them fail. They will not get to whoever is supposed to read it, because by spamming such companies and individuals are destroying the internet.
When someone starts employing email spam filters and deletes ton of emails, sometimes it deletes honest emails too. Imagine if your filter gets triggered by word REPLY, but that word can be used in honest decent email. If it gets triggered by the word REPLY, then it will probably include words REPLYING and others. Plus if filtering works for one person, that person will share it with his friends or coworkers and other will try the same. Perfect scenario to destruction of the internet thanks to spamming.
So What Can Be Done?
First step is the simple one. Make sure you understand what is spam, why it is bad and destructive and to never use it for any reason. It seems that it is silent, but it destroys more than we can imagine. First step also includes you to spread that word. If you have kids, teach them about it, what is it and why it is bad for all of us.
What can be done is very difficult question. Spam cannot be stopped, it can only be limited. We would have to change people and their outlook at the world and teach everyone what is good and what is bad. Email service and email addresses are available to everyone, so they can be used by everyone. If you use your email as everyone does, then it is public, it travels across the planet and some places will collect it and generate email address packages for sale. To send you an email costs nothing. To send you email million times costs also nothing. You have a small tiny business but you learn about using spam and suddenly you feel bigger and more powerful.
It is a long battle against very bad business practice, it is slow and it goes step by step, but it is important. If you detect business that uses spam email, don’t do any business with them and let them know about it. If they laugh at you just hang up the phone or delete their email. Make such information public when possible, post such info online, tell your friends, coworkers, everyone when it makes sense. Use email filters, just be careful and test it so you don’t stop receiving emails you wanted. If you create list of very good filter keywords, share it with others. Talk to and do business with spammers’ competitors.
Talk to politicians too. It seems like a small issue, not important, but it is very powerful and major. Imagine that some spammer sent you 300 spam emails last year. And he has the list of 10 million addresses and he sent email to every one of them, and also 300 of them last year. 10 million times 300 = 3 billion emails. That is substantial work for the internet where it produces nothing decent. 1 spammer and 3 billion spam emails. But there is not just 1 spammer there are thousands or millions of them out there. So talking to politicians may be very productive activity.
Spamming Costs Us Money
It is expensive for our society to tolerate spam. We could go into big numbers with electricity, equipment, network, but let’s just do a minor simple math anyone can imagine. Let’s say someone sends only 100,000 spam emails to people in one city. They all receive it, do not use any filters, so it takes them some time to figure out it is spam and to delete it. Some people will do this fast, some will open the message and start reading and waste more time. On average let’s say it takes about 15 seconds to delete this spam by every recipient. And let’s also assume that on average every person out there normally makes $10 an hour.
OK. So 100 thousand spam emails get delivered, it takes 15 seconds for each to get deleted. That is 1.5 million seconds or about 417 hours of total time. If it were productive time, all recipients could charge $10/hour, so in this example the total income would be $4,170. Cost of power, computers or phones, waste of time, etc etc etc, let’s imagine we have about $4,500 in total. And this is only one spam email sent to 100 thousand people.
What if their email list had million or two or more? The cost of such activity for society goes into thousands and more. Spam also goes across the borders, it reaches poor people, people who have less education, who don’t understand that spam also equals lies and fraud.
Very complicated subject that is very simple. Spam is bad for everyone, don’t do it, don’t support it, don’t participate in any activity that uses spam. Simple, case closed. Internet has been developed and established for million wonderful reasons, of course there is money, business, travel, communication, but also health, education, freedom, democracy and more. And we would let it suffer because someone wants to sell some junk to everyone?
We are better than that.
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