No, I don’t want any Celebrex, Paxil, Prozac, Vioxx, Xenical,
Zoloft, Zyban, steroids or human growth hormone.
No, I don’t want any Celebrex, Paxil, Prozac, Vioxx, Xenical, Zoloft, Zyban, steroids or human growth hormone.
No, I don’t want to re-finance my home, get a low-interest loan or turn a $463 investment into $65,000.
No, I don’t want to view singles of people in my area or date beautiful Russian women who are anxious to meet American men. And if I did, I still wouldn’t want to satisfy them all night long. A guy’s gotta sleep sometime.
And, no, I don’t want bigger body parts – particularly those that aren’t standard male-issue.
But I get these offers several times a day. So do you. And there’s not much we can do about it – not even after Monday’s news that America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft are banding together to fight spam. I’d more expect the members of that particular triad – the Iraq, Israel and France of the Internet world – to work on dumping their e-trash into the others’ back yards.
As far as I’m concerned, better news on the anti-spam front came last month, when financial penalties against telemarketers for making unsolicited calls to anyone on the “do not call” list became California law.
It’s a simple concept. If your name is on the list (you can sign up – no charge – at nocall.doj.state.ca.us/) and if you get a call from someone offering you a great investment deal in a left-handed metric selenium mine in Abu Dhabi, they’ll be fined. If this happens enough times, they might be fined right out of business.
It seems like a similar solution for spam would be just as simple. AOL already has one, and I assume Microsoft’s MSN and other services do as well. On AOL, you can simply click the “report spam” button and somebody presumably does something about it. I’m not sure what, since I don’t get nearly as much spam at home as I do at work, so it’s easy enough to just hit the “delete” button about a dozen times.
At the Free Lance, we use Microsoft Outlook Express, which I swear has smarmy little guys standing out front going, “Psst – hey, spam, c’mere! You gotta check this out!” – in other words, spam filters that are about as effective as catching rain in a tennis racket.
And by the way – what genius designed e-mail software that requires a document to be open before you can delete it? With so much spam being graphics-heavy these days, waiting for it to open 20 or 30 times a day just so you can send it packing takes way too much time – time that could be better spent forwarding the latest Baghdad Bob joke to everybody on the planet.
But I don’t see why there can’t be a non-proprietary anti-spam agency – it could be called the Office of Spamland Security – to which any unwanted e-mail could be forwarded. Agents would then track the sender’s address, and a team of CIA-trained hamsters could be sent to nibble away at the innards of the spammers’ computers.
OK, it needs a little work – like maybe weasels instead of hamsters. But it’s got to be better than deleting months’ worth of spam the hard way before learning how to set up Outlook’s auto-dump feature. When I ran the “Empty deleted items” command last Thursday, it took exactly five minutes and 55 seconds to send all that spam to wherever spam goes when it’s flushed.
And the second it was all gone, my e-mail chime went off. My neck and shoulders tensed as I clicked on the new e-missive.
“Getting a mortgage loan has never been easier!” it said. “Refinance today! Get your free quote now!”
Sigh…
