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OK, so I'm working out after work, sweating my ass off hitting the heavy bag, and for some reason I start thinking about spam. As the subject line states, not the canned luncheon meat. Spam, as in the worthless mounds of e-shit that Gmail so neatly tucks into the Spam folder of my Inbox, and allows me to flush w/the click of one button. Speaking of which, Gmail does a pretty nice job of separating the treasures from the trash, and leaving only the valid e-mails I maybe kinda sorta wanna read in my Inbox. I also have a Yahoo! account, and use the advanced webmail version. But Yahoo tends to let more Spam in my Inbox than Gmail does. Most of the e-mail in my Yahoo Inbox tends to be shit, w/a few valid messages sprinkled amid, whereas Gmail rarely lets spam find its way to my Inbox, and has only once or twice spam-marked a valid message. Anyway, I digress; back to my mid-workout train-of-thought...
I read somewhere that spam makes up some ridiculously disproportionate amount of e-mail traffic, something like 90% I believe. I'd buy that, as I get from 150-200 spam messages a day. And I've been pretty careful about where I post my Gmail addy for just this reason - to keep it (and me) from being sold to some telemarketing cum e-mail list source that never begets one byte of anything valuable.
But I got to thinking, for no apparent reason, "what if someone looked at my spam folder and formed their opinion of me based on that?". What if we judged each other by the contents of our spam or junk mail folders? What if you had to take a snapshot of this fodder & include it on a job app, or as part of your CV, or give it to someone you really like over dinner on your first date? Based solely on spam I'd be a prescription drug fiending, cash advance seeking, car loan needing pervert clearly unsatisfied w/"that certain part of the male anatomy", w/out a shred of discretion regarding who he dates. I mean damn, how fucked up is that?! I get spam advertising Viagra, that shit Bob takes & makes the neighbors & his friends jealous (and his wife grin like a nitrous-snorting peyote-eating tequila-guzzling fool), next-day cash advance services, Vicodin delivered to your door, not to mention endless offers to meet local single Asians, Christians, IndoEurAsianEskimo trans-sexuals (j/k). Oh yeah, I'm also the world's greatest or most ardent product tester, getting offers to evaluate an endless slew of laptops, desktops, washer/dryer sets, and video game consoles/systems (all of which wil be mine to keep! Yippee kai-yaay!!!). And I'm a shop-a-holic too, for fuck's sake, with more gift cards than I can count just waiting to be delivered at the drop of my address confirmation! And I guess nursing, law enforcement, or making money off of posting (or clicking on) Google-type ads is most promising source of income. Just nuckin' futs...
There's really no point to all this, except to point out how fucked up the Internet has become. Not that I need to make this point, but hey. E-mail is a great communications tool, and obviously has it's uses, and value. But who'da thunk that junk e-mail would become so pervasive? If not for the easy of ignoring it & discarding it, spam would be exponentially more intrusive & annoying than telemarketing phone calls before the "no call" lists, and hard-copy junk mail. It's sad too, because sending spam does cost someone money. Money to enlist some company, or someone's computer or server, to pump out millions of e-mails. Someone gets paid to collect our e-mail addresses. Someone pays for the elecricity to run the computers used to send this shit. People spend money in hopes of making money. So that means logically that someone is making money, which means that someone is buying this shit, or clicking on links in spam e-mail to make someone else money through per-click revenue, or some such shit. Oh the ignominy...
I guess that there will always be people who send their bank account s to an orphaned Nigerian princess who is trying to pull together enough money to get her father's gold from the Nigerian National Non-existent Bank & Trust, and will most surely send you your share (*wink wink*), and there will be those that continue to sign up to test a new Dell, or get a free Wii, or confirm their address for a Target/Wal Mart/Kmart gift card. And all these clicks just perpetuate the nasty cycle.
Hell, sometimes reading thru the subject lines in my spam folder is funnier than any joke I hear or cartoon I read through the course of my day. At least I know I'm not alone. In some way we're all lumped into the same group of social degenerates & dysfunctional freaks, and those that justmight be foolish enough to click the links therein. Doubt me? Have you looked in your junk mail folder lately?
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