E-mail inboxes get taken over with PR agency spam
Some of you out there read this column, or so I’ve heard. A very
few of you may get all the way to the end and take note of the
e-mail address there where people can write to me.
Funny thing about e-mail addresses, though
… when they’re in the newspaper, they suddenly become public
property.
E-mail inboxes get taken over with PR agency spam
Some of you out there read this column, or so I’ve heard. A very few of you may get all the way to the end and take note of the e-mail address there where people can write to me.
Funny thing about e-mail addresses, though … when they’re in the newspaper, they suddenly become public property.
I remember more than a year ago when I started the column and established an e-mail address specifically for Pinnacle readers to write to me. The trouble is that now, it’s not just Pinnacle readers writing to me.
Mind you, I have never signed up for anything on this account. I have not requested real estate quotes or movie times or any of the millions of potential things one can sign up for on the Internet. I have not surfed any Web sites while using it.
I purposely kept this e-mail account very clean so that it would be reserved only for e-mails from the people who read my column.
Yet there was a day late last year when I visited my e-mail inbox late, and I was in for a shock and a surprise.
There were probably 500 e-mails in there. And very, very few of them were from you, Dear Readers.
So what were they? It wasn’t typical spam. Mostly they were “story ideas” from public relations agencies. I say “story ideas” loosely because mostly the P.R. agencies are trying to sell something by getting some poor reporter or columnist to write about it.
Luckily, I have no problem turning down ideas that I’m not interested in.
But the depth and breadth of the press releases was staggering. And so many things I had never heard of!
Did you know, for instance, that National Daylight Appreciation Day was last Sunday? Or that you can save both the environment and money from your shower? Or that you can use a convenient Web site to design your own custom fabrics? Or that you can have happy feet this summer? Whatever that means.
Every month, I’m getting hundreds of these things, all of them exhorting me to write about this thing or that thing. I also have access to a “leading sports coach and golf guru,” a “leading lifestyle expert,” and “France’s designer of the year,” if I need people to interview.
Oh, and of course I am getting a few good ol’ normal spams, such as the Nigerian scam e-mails. I received one just the other day from my good friend, barrister Ejere Damba, who is offering me $30.5 million dollars if I only reply and fill out a form.
Yeah, right.
I’m also getting the occasional letter from my fans in Hollister, and I thank you very much for that. But for the most part, it’s spam, spam, spam.
I think of it as being my own little Kingdom of Spamalot.
I don’t know how all these spam e-mails found me, but there they are. I found it incredibly irritating at first. Now I’m just finding it amusing.
I also find it really odd that so many of these P.R. agencies would target me, a lowly columnist at a little weekly newspaper.
Anyway, this is a very roundabout way of apologizing to a couple of Hollister people who have sent e-mail to me and got lost in the spam. In case you were wondering why I didn’t reply for several months, that’s why.
