I assume that most of the folk who send out spam – or, at least, most of the businesses on behalf of whom they send it – are merely too stupid to realize how utterly evil their behaviour is. I assume this for no reason of hard fact but merely because I'm naïvely determined to believe that most folk wouldn't do anything they understood to be a vile imposition on the rest of us.
Of course, if you send an e-mail to a random million e-mail addresses, there
is some fraction of the recipients who'll respond to it: and it costs no more to
send an e-mail to a million recipients than to one, once you've got an address
list that large. So the idiot logic of advertising is: ram your aggressive
begging down the throats of enough people and ignore the vast majority who find
it infuriating and deeply offensive, so long as some fraction (no matter how
tiny) of your victims fall for your spiel. Normal advertising doesn't go quite
so far because they have to pay for each extra victim on whom they inflict their
vileness – but they still inflict it on far more folk than actually
respond favourably to it, it just becomes uneconomic if suckers are too low a
fraction of the people whose time you waste and whose willingness to deal
promptly with received communications you undermine. With e-mail, the cost of
sending doesn't grow with the number of victims (at least as long as you're
happy to have the sending done by a business associate
who's somehow able
to delegate the sending to a vast array of machines – hint: the machines'
owners didn't give informed consent to this use) so they'd gladly inflict their
advertising on the whole planet if they could. Some (undoubtedly ignorable)
fraction of the e-mail addresses in the domain .uk do in fact
belong to folk in the USA who have mortgages, so flooding Britain's e-mail
addresses with advertising for services utterly useless to anyone without a
USA-based mortgage makes economic sense to the scoundrels who form the back-bone
of the internet advertising industry.
This situation has caused much annoyance to many of those who want the
internet to be useful – which includes practically all of us who was using
the internet before Netscape made the web famous. The kinds of e-mail that are
sent out on the basis of the above – grossly inconsiderate and
short-sighted – logic
have come to be execrated and have earned the
nick-name spam
. (This originates from reference to a Monty-Python sketch
which expressed exasperation with the (then) ubiquity of a (nutritious and
– in my limited experience – quite nice to eat – if fried
thoroughly enough) pig-based food product: my impression is that, in the
aftermath of the war to stop Hitler's megalomania, nicer things were in short
supply, so that what was available became tiresome to endure.) Various definitions of
the term may be found but
(once one leaves aside the food-stuff) the common theme is that the sender did
not have – or even bother to see whether there might be – proper
grounds for supposing that the recipient might have any interest in recieving
the communication.
The usual type of such e-mails is an attempt to persuade the recipient to
engage in some economic (or, sometimes, socio-political) activity. Since the
degenerates who send out such e-mails need large lists of e-mail addresses to
which to send advertising
, and get more money from their idiot clients
when they can aver that the addresses are all real (i.e. someone is really going
to have to waste their time deleting this from their in-box), merely replying to
an e-mail with no intelligible economic motive does, in fact, engage in an
economic activity – it tells the evil piece of excrement who sent the
e-mail that your e-mail address is real
. Even if your reply makes it
entirely clear that you are not at all interested in doing business with its
recipients or their clients, they'll add you to their list of willing
recipients: they aren't reading the replies to their e-mail (I mean, who can
afford the time to read their e-mail ? the damn in-box is flooded with
advertising and scams), they just have a robot which records which addresses
replied and, implicitly, treat each such reply as a desperate plea to recieve
vast amounts of information
about further possible economic
arrangements.
It should not need to be said that having an e-mail address does not mean
that I wish to buy your product – just as the fact that I exist does not
mean that I wish to: move my debts to your bank; purchase medication from your
pharmacy (the fact that it's in Canada may well mean that it's cheaper than
medicines in the USA, but this is irrelevant to me, as I live on a continent
where the economic incentives encourage medical practitioners to keep their
patients healthy, rather than to prescribe for them the most expensive
medications on the market, regardless of need – and I've no interest at
all in buying medication
targetted at those with insecurities about their
sexual prowess), let alone; add my contact details to your list of those that
actually do succeed in wasting some recipient's time.
I guess some senders of such things rationalize the evil they do by
supposing that it only takes me a moment or two to work out that I don't want
the vile trash they've dumped in my in-box. I sincerely hope that every
dog-owner within a few kilometers of their home uses their front yard as a
dumping ground for what doggy did on the side-walk – tidying up one turd
can't take you that long, now can it ? The junkies may as well chuck in
their needles and the whore's johns can chuck in their used protection
as
bonuses – each of which will only take a moment to clean up – how
could you mind any of that ? Their reasoning is based on the bogus
presumption that they're the world's unique and only person inconsiderate and
stupid enough to suppose such a ridiculous thing. As it happens, there are
hundreds of them per day who make the same presumptuous mistake. That
means that, as far as I'm concerned, each of those senders is jointly and
severally responsible for wasting hundreds of my moments per day. Furthermore,
since I get rather more than a hundred such e-mails per day, I necessarily
proceed somewhat hastily through my in-box, at the risk of losing some mails
from genuine correspondents who merely happen to be using mailers which produce
results resembling spam: part of the price of spam is that real e-mails get lost
because it's impractical to review the endless torrent as thoroughly as would be
needed to not miss any of what deserves to be seen. Those who send spam are
jointly and severally guilty of causing those messages to not reach their proper
recipients.
I'm told that I shouldn't publish my e-mail address anywhere public, since it's sure to be abused if I do. On the other hand, I have a web site, whose readers may properly wish to respond to what I have said on it. It would be uncivil to not provide such readers with a proper means to respond. There is no sense in which making my e-mail address available can reasonably be construed as an invitation to send arbitrary messages unrelated to what I have actually done, published, said or asked to hear about. Anyone who takes the view that my very existence, or indeed the existence of ways to contact me, amounts to an invitation to solicit my business should bear in mind that I consider that the holding of such a perverse and presumtuous opinion amounts to an invitation to visit, upon its holder, all the harm that I can find it within my power to inflict. Since this scum treat the rest of us so inconsiderately as to render e-mail – a potentially excellent improvement in the means of human communication – hard to use, it is my civic duty to purge the world of them or, at the very least, do what I can to mitigate (at their expense) the manifest harm they inflict upon us all.
On a personal note, if you happen to be one of those who feels entitled to
ignore my opinions on the proper use of e-mail, please feel free to
SHOVE YOUR HEAD IN AN INDUSTRIAL BLENDER, EXPERIMENT WITH THE EFFECTS OF
HIGH-POWER MACHINE TOOLS ON THE PHYSICAL INTEGRITY OF YOUR SKULL (and its
contents, if any), EXPLORE THE JOYS OF HEAD-FIRST HEAD-BUTTING OF SOLID ROCK
FROM HIGH ALTITUDE (without parachute) and – if those fail to
restrain you from sending me spam – in any way you prefer, eliminate
yourself from the human population WITHOUT FURTHER WASTING INTERNET
BANDWIDTH. I also sincerely hope that, if you believe in an afterlife,
you get whatever kind of REALLY, YOU'RE NOT GOING TO LIKE THIS
option
your beliefs have on offer.
On the off chance that you fail to follow my advice, and in the confident expectation that the after-life doesn't contain any punishment adequate to the evil you are doing in this life, be aware that I am intimately familiar with the internet protocols and not afraid to use them: when I can find the time and energy, I'm apt to research ways to make the guilty suffer in their present mortal incarnations. I'm also entirely certain to be utterly merciless about this because: (i) even then I won't have punished you enough; (ii) you, and those like you, have caused me to fail to receive e-mails I would have been willing to handle, because the sender's e-mail agent was so lame and mis-guided as to make their message look like the FOUL POLUTION with which you routinely choke my in-box; and (iii) it takes significant effort on my part, so I'll damn well make it count when I can be bothered to do it.
Written by Eddy.