Throughout its history spam has had a really hard time. As a staple food during in American camps during WWII they just couldn’t wait to get rid of it. After ousting Mussolini the allies did manage to swap a large amount with the Italians for booze and other similarly more appealing foodstuffs. But aside from a country recovering from fascism and the ravages of war, to whom a can of unidentifiable pink meat may have been quite appealing, one must search far and wide to find a true spam advocate and rightly so.
I’m not waging a one man war against that wonderful anonymous meat product, without which the humble ‘fritter’ would simply not exist. No, I’ve merely penned a long winded introduction to an equally meandering rant about spam’s online namesake.
I bring this up the day after MySpace finally won its court case against some rather prolific spammers who have been ordered to pay out a meaty £117m for their sins. Their crimes include phishing offences and sending more than ‘700,000’ spam messages to random MySpace members. MySpace has won a great victory against this highly annoying practice.
At the core of it all is the confounding question of: ‘Who exactly opens this stuff?’ These guys are making thousands of pounds on the basis of probability and someone, somewhere continues to pay their wages. With the quality of spam emails that make it through my email filter I find it incredible that they make any money at all. But the spam industry continues to flourish and I see no let-off in the intensity of the attack.
This is a call to action or inaction to those wayward clickers who may be reading and continuing to line these cyber extortionists’ pockets: Leave you junk box unchecked! Leave that obscene email unopened! Together we can beat the scourge of email and live once again with a tidy and easily managed inbox.
