On my list of life’s daily annoyances, spam should rank very low. Thanks to the delete key, it should be nothing more than an inconsequential blip in my day. Yet, annoy is what it does, because in some strange way it gets into my head and forces me to expend more energy thinking about it than it I should. I’ll explain.
One of the emailboxes I check each day is connected to an old AOL email address from my years at WNUA. I haven’t found a personal message there for awhile now, but since it’s still an active address, I check it compulsively every day. One hundred percent of the messages I find there is junk email—it’s all spam, in other words. Yet, less than half of it gets automatically sent to the spam folder, and that bothers me. It’s obvious that the spam filter at AOL needs to be improved. A spam filter that’s less than 50% effective is worthless, if you ask me, since you still have to do the work of deleting everything it lets slip past.
Then there are the experts always telling you how to minimize the amount of spam you get. Somehow, though, they never seem to warn you about what can really cause spam to pile up in your mailbox: things that require you to create an online paper trail, such as being a college student in the internet age. My wife used to get very little spam. That is, until she started taking classes at UIC. After she registered for her classes, bought the necessary textbooks and opened various accounts on Blackboard and the like, she started getting a ton of spam—40-50 unsolicited messages on most days.
There is one thing I find amusing about spam, and it’s something that really hasn’t changed since the beginning: the poor spelling and generally atrocious grammar. I suspect companies that spam aren’t recruiting from the top of any graduating class.
Tags: spam
