Spam sucks!! (Part 2 of 2)
Zedd, 12/18/02
Hi folks, I know it’s been a while since I’ve rapped at y’all, but Zedd’s been busy. So now, I’ll try to pick up where I left everything hanging all those long weeks ago.
What were we talking about? Oh yeah, spam. It sucks, period. I could leave it there and be pretty happy with it, but that wouldn’t be like your old friend Zedd, would it?
So yeah, spam is still rolling in at record pace to my yahoo account, despite my slight efforts to use their spam filter. I must have put that address into quite a few web forms. And they turned around and sold my address to who knows how many other spammers. That’s one thing that I think should be illegal. The sale of lists of email addresses should be outlawed. An email address should be a person’s private space that should not be violated without their consent. I don’t give a damn if a company says that they are just giving the email address to people who will use it responsibly to send them emails about things that they will be interested in. Sorry folks, but I’m not interested in penis enlargers or online gambling. It would, of course, be hard to catch people who did this, but putting it in the books would at least give unsuspecting email holders a chance to get mail that they actually want, not what someone else thinks that they might want.
Ok, great. Now that we’ve got that taken care of, let’s move onto something else. I did see one encouraging sign on the internet. Unfortunately, the story isn’t up any more, so here’s the skinny. Some big spammer was sued by Verizon for taking up too much of their bandwidth with spam. I think money was involved, but the settlement just ended up that the guy is no longer allowed to have his companies send any spam to Verizon subscribers. I think that’s a good sign. Someone is finally taking these damn spammers to task for what they are doing. They are a nuisance, and they gum up the Internet. I wish the government itself would step in and shut these people down, but the appropriate laws just haven’t been enacted.
If they ever get around to cleaning up email, I think one way to start collecting evidence against spammers would be to allow citizens to turn over their old email addresses to some agency that would pick through the spam and use it against the senders. I know I’ve got one address that would be of use in such a scheme.
Well folks, until next time, adios.