| TED SPEAKS...ABOUT E-MAIL |
| A PERSONAL SPIN ON SPAM . |
I have a second toilet in my home which the Water Board knows nothing about. It's not connected to a conventional plumbing system. Rather, this toilet is located on my computer, inside my e-mail program. It's called an INBOX.
I remember when downloading my e-mail was a personal adventure, wondering which friend or acquaintance would surprise me with a personal letter this time. Not so anymore. Nowadays, most of my contacts seem to have lost their fascination with desk-to-desk correspondence. In their place, the only messages I see, to receive with any regularity originate from strangers with bogus addresses, whose only interest in me is to sell me something I don’t want.
I can assure you, Gentle Reader, that I have never inquired about Viagra, on or off line, nor have I ever visited a porn website. I surf the Internet the way I live: conservatively. I maintain a low profile and keep to myself as much as anyone can in this electronic environment. Yet, I must receive, not one, but several offers for Viagra, or a Viagra-like supplement, every day. Equally prolific are those sleazy come-ons from people with names like "Errika" and "Sondra", containing subject lines like Hi, Sweetie!, Check this out! and other remarks that I won't repeat in friendly company. Over time, my personal INBOX has degenerated into an impersonal receptacle into which the world's sewage is poured. I highlight entire blocks of unread messages, click DELETE, then flush. The box fills up again the next day, and I repeat the process. It's sickening.
My experience is hardly unique. Junk mail is inundating mail servers as never before, crippling systems and choking off legitimate communication among individuals and businesses.
What offends me most about spam is not the obsession with anatomical enhancements, for I receive a flood of innocuous ads as well. It's the intrusion upon my space that I chiefly hate. When e-mailers bombard me with something I didn't ask for—whether they're pitching sexual fantasies, low interest loans, get-rich gimmicks, or software that enables me to spy on my neighbors—I feel violated, exploited, demeaned by the presumption that I am some shallow, click-happy boob who can be baited and pestered into lunging at every stupid fad somebody dangles in front of me. Truth is, it matters not a jot who I am or what I’m interested in. I am targeted by every Tom, Dick and Sondra for no other reason than that my machine is connected to the Internet. If my washing machine were online, someone would probably find a way to print messages on my undershirts.
These spammers are waging a war, not just for our money, but for our minds. Like any other enemy, they invade our territory, hijack our resources and exploit what they perceive to be our weakness: namely, our inability to resist an offer.
How can we hope to turn the tide in this warfare? Anti-spam software is a step in the right direction. But that, in and of itself, is not enough. For one thing, the enemy is cunning, he’s desperate, and his technology is several steps ahead of ours. So are his tactics. No matter how smart a campaign we wage to ward him off, he will always find ways to penetrate our defenses. Moreover, since bulk mailings are extremely cheap and easy to send, even a marginal response will generate a profit for the spammer. In spite of all our protests, all our technology, it is this small margin of obliging recipients out there in the electronic galaxy that gives junk mail its reason for being. Which is why I contend that the ultimate weapon in this warfare lies, not in our spam filters, but on the original hard drive God installed between our ears when He made us—“fearfully” and quite “wonderfully”, I might add.
I feel it’s past time for us to reclaim our dignity. Just as we protect our homes from predators by locking our doors at night, so must we guard our intellectual property by refusing, en masse, to respond to any unsolicited e-mail, however enticing, or harmless, it may appear. We need to be especially wary of those messages in which the sender masquerades as an old friend by addressing us by name, or somehow incorporating our name and/or e-mail handle into the subject line. This pretense of familiarity, in case you haven’t figured this out already, is nothing more than a ruse to tickle the recipient’s curiosity to and trick him into clicking on an e-mail that he might otherwise have had the good sense to ignore. Once he has opened that message, he has stepped onto the spammer’s turf.
Mere indignation won’t put an end to the blizzard of bull that clogs the Internet and fills our inboxes every hour of the day. Junk mailers have no feelings for us to wound. We can’t discourage them by telling them to drop dead and never bother us again. They know people hate them; they don’t care. As long as somebody, somewhere, nibbles at their hook, as long as there’s money to be made in getting on people’s nerves, spam will forever be an integral part of our lives. Like taxes. Like roaches. Like the common cold.
In this game, action talks, bellyaching walks. We need to resolve, each and every one of us, never to patronize a spammer, never to visit a spammer’s site—not even to click on an unsolicited message. For any activity on our part, even a negative response, simply confirms to the junk mailer (or the junk mailer’s system) that he’s connected with a living person. And as long as there’s an active connection, the spammer (or the spammer’s system) knows that he has a receptacle into which to dump his payload.
The ultimate question boils down to this: Is there any profit in harassing people? That’s going to be up to us to decide. We need to send the message to those predators in the communications and entertainment industries, who presume to know what makes us tick, that our inboxes are not toilets. Our televisions are not toilets. Our minds are not toilets.
But people will never affect any real changes—not in the marketplace, not in Hollywood, and certainly not on the Internet—unless they stand firm and stand united. Together, we have the power to put these parasites out of business. Alone, we are nothing more than custodians of other people’s garbage.
How we respond tells the enemy, and the rest of the world, what we think of ourselves.
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