The Random Blogger

I’ve commented before that I don’t like my time being wasted, and yet these days, if you have an email account, you’re likely to be suffering from another huge time-waster, a problem that is so large that some of the brightest boffins on the planet apparently can’t solve it.

I am, of course, talking about spam, or unsolicited commercial email, to give it a slightly more formal name.

It always was annoying, at the very least, but then some idiot managed to start sending out emails as though they were coming from one of my own websites - spoofing, I believe it’s called.

That’s bad enough, in itself, as people will incorrectly think I’m the spammer, but even worse is that these emails are being sent out with the return receipt setting turned on. For those that don’t know, that means that the sender (which appears to be me) receives an email notification every time somebody reads any of this garbage, or, if an email can’t be delivered.

In one day, the volume of my spam went from several hundred (per day), which was already too much, to several thousand!

I kid you not.

There were days when I received over 30,000 unwanted emails!

I’d run anti-spam software for many years, seeing it as one of the necessary costs of being on the Internet.

My favourite had been Inboxer, but I had to swap from using Outlook to Outlook Express and, sadly, they don’t do a version that works with this mail program.

So, I bought Cloudmark instead, and I’d been (and still am) very happy with it, but it really wasn’t designed to cope with a sudden influx of tens of thousands of emails.

Not that it detected all of these return receipts, because they look genuine.

I tried setting up email rules to move them all to a separate folder and/or delete them, but there were simply too many variations to catch them all.

More of these emails were arriving faster than I could delete them!

So, I finally succumbed and subscribed to Spam Arrest. For those that don’t know, this is a hosted anti-spam service that is based on a challenge/response mechanism: the first time I receive an email from somebody whose email address is not recognised, the Spam Arrest system sends them an email containing a link they must click.

It’s very effective, but it does come at a cost, as does everything in life.

For starters, real people don’t always respond to these challenge emails.

And then, if you’re not expecting a message from somebody, you have to scan through your list of “unverified” emails, to see what’s there and manually approve them. That may be workable for most people, but it’s not viable when you’re receiving tens of thousands of emails a day!

Having said that, I’d have been lost without Spam Arrest. (I did try a few other competing services, but they were not up to the job at all.)

So, I’m more or less back in control of the spam issue, at last.

But it still makes me very angry - managing all of this has cost me time - a lot of it - and money.

I sort of understand why some of these spam emails are being sent out - after all, they are trying to sell something (mainly software, watches or male enhancement products, as they’re euphemistically called), or they’re conducting a phishing scam (it’s a dirty, underhand practice, and it amazes me that people fall for it - check out “Phishing Lures - A Tutorial On How Not To Get Caught By Them” for ways to spot these and avoid being caught).

But what I don’t get are the many spam emails where there are no products on offer, no links to clink - just a line or two of meaningless text.

Perhaps they’re just after creating a mailing list based on what doesn’t bounce back to them?

But what I do know is that spam is a massive issue for many people, as well as businesses, and that it costs an inordinate amount of time, energy and money dealing with it.

Since I opened my Spam Arrest account in March 2007, there have been well over seven million emails processed through their service, and nearly 95% of those have been spam or otherwise unwanted messages.

When time is the one commodity that’s more precious than anything else - you can’t buy more of it, for example -, it really annoys me that other people can waste so much of mine.

That’s why I refuse to buy anything that arrives in an unwanted email, no matter how good it sounds (and I’m not just talking about the male enhancement products here). Every person that buys something from a spam email is encouraging these people to send out more - after all, it must work or they wouldn’t keep doing it. If absolutely nobody bought anything (and nobody fell for those phishing scams either), there’d be no point sending them out.

So, please, never respond to any spam message - don’t buy any products, don’t visit any websites they link to, and don’t try to unsubscribe, assuming they provide an unsubscribe link (as that only confirms your email address to them)!