Checking my inbox this morning I found myself reading a “news letter” from Panda security. (I think I may have registered for this one at some time in the distant past) Anyway, their headline was “84% of emails received are SPAM*” (* Data from the Internauts Association .)
At first I just deleted it and went on deleting the spam that my 2 spam systems missed. Then it kind of sank in and I started rummaging though my trash looking for it. 84% of email is spam! that means that for every 100 emails you get, roughly 16 of them are legit, and the rest are trying to get you to buy questionable tablets or increase your organ size or buy some stock so that the email writers can sell their shares when you’ve made them worth something. (called a pump and dump).
Currently (in the past 24 hours) I’ve been getting inundated by spam, 3 times more than normal so I have no trouble believing that at all. In fact in my case currently, I’d put my spam ratio at around 92%. It’s a shame that something as useful as email has been relegated to an annoyance because of greedy knob heads.
Here is the funny bit though, I just received a spam email titled “Not all spam is spam. Some spam is kosher.” by some group by the name of “Tikkun” and they state that some email like political and non profit emails should be allowed as they are kind of public service stuff. The problem with his argument, is that email is worldwide.
Tikkun (in this instance) are a US political group. (or at least associated with one.) I’m in Australia. I don’t want my inbox filled with every political group in the world trying to convince me of their point of view. Heck, most of the time I don’t want my inbox filled with Australian politicos trying to sway my opinion to their cause. If I don’t think I know enough about something, I’ll research it. I don’t need help.
Likewise with the non profits, I don’t want the deaf foundation of America (just a made up example) trying to solicit money from me here in Australia. We have a deaf society of our own thank you. What it comes down to, is that email will be replaced with something else. (probably something that costs money) if it becomes useless as is slowly happening now. Money would solve the problem because if it cost money to send spam, it would no longer be viable. As it stands now, these people will kill the medium for everyone and something precious and undreamed of 50 years ago will have been lost.
In short, I’ll not be convinced that any unsolicited email isn’t spam until it can be limited to the region for which it is relevant, And probably not even then. Am I alone in that?
