SPAM Never Stops Being a Tantrum Tuesday Rant

SPAM (the email type) is an insult to the canned mystery meat. SPAM is more than a nuisance – it costs our economy $71 billion in lost productivity.

With several addresses, I often get 700 – 900 unwanted messages a day! With an average 20 seconds to skim a message, every day I spend up to 4 hours just dealing with SPAM. I don’t know about you but I have a lot better things to spend my time on.

Since no SPAM filter can take the place of your eyes – I have to look at every message at least for a microsecond before I hit delete. Just what a business needs is to delete a message from a customer. But if you’ve every tried to reach a major U.S. corporation by email – forget about it! Their SPAM filters are often set so high your message never gets to anyone’s desk! So we’re drowned out because of SPAM.

As a freelance writer, I often had messages bounce back with a “we won’t read this” SPAM error message because of select keywords in my research requests.

Sure I could change all my addresses but that would become a nightmare as I live and do business online 24/7. Besides that’s only a temporary solution.

So what are we do to?

Take it serious and insist that our government agencies do likewise. This theft of time and money is a tremendous drain on everyone.
NEVER respond in any way to an unsolicited email message. They wouldn’t be sending them if they weren’t making money.
Contact any “legitmate” companies that seem to be using unsolicited messages and complain. Do not use the SPAM message to contact them. Find the company via a search engine.
Read how to pull the plug on unwanted messages.
Report SPAM to the federal government. There is a specific way to forward the header so the agency can trace back the activity.
The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 needs the attention of consumer groups and more enforcement power. Since its enactment, things have only gotten worse.