Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Who’s Afraid of Spamming?


I believe spamming is now the fastest growing industry. There are companies whose core competency is innovative spamming, whose chief’s designation is Chief Spamming Officer, and they must be enjoying annual retainership from more than 1,000 clients each.

One of my duties is to look after a website called indiarace.com. As the Chief Editor of this leading horse-racing site, I get about 300 e-mails everyday. And the most-hit key when using my e-mail program is ‘Del’.

Take the example of yesterday. In the morning when I opened my mailbox, there were 272 mails waiting-to-be-read-or-seen in the Inbox. Spammers clearly don’t take holidays.

Of the 272, 26 e-mails were from contributors and readers of the site. Of the rest, nearly 100 mails offered assured help in length and growth of a very private male organ. They asked, “Why do you fall weak and slow?” and suggested “Some extra seconds will help”. It was all about “Enhancing your desire, pleasure, and performance”.

There were about 20 mails promoting some porno sites. They all carried the same text: “Hello! I am tired this afternoon. I am nice girl that would like to chat with you. Email me at …. only, because I am using my friend's email to write this. I would like to share some of my pics.”

Pharma vendors offered their ware in about 80 mails. You can buy Viagra to medicines for controlling depression at 81% to 95% off (why not 80%, I wonder). Most of them were customised offers for the Editor of Indiarace!

In 15 mails, various organisations and individuals from Nigeria to Canada congratulated me for winning lotteries or grants. There were also some Russian, Latavian and Romanian ladies who have inherited millions of dollars, but needed my help to retrieve that money. Tthey all promised to share half the amount with me. I totalled and saw that in a day I have gained more than $4500,000,000!

I don’t have a PhD degree. So I was tempted when four organisations offered me an accredited PhD in 30 days! Another e-mail said: “No test, No class, buy yourself Bacheelor/MasteerMBA/Doctoraate dip1omas, VALID in all contries”.

Being an Editor, I need magazines. So, 10 companies offered free Cisco magazine, Oracle Magazine, Gardener to Good Housekeeping. It just needs filling up a form giving quite a few personal details.

There were also “Loan offer at a very cheap interest rate”, offer to “Buy, Sell, Rent or Invest in Dubai Real Estate”, and 270 popular software programs to be downloaded for free.

Now, you would say, most e-mail programs use good spam filters; so why not click on the “Delete all spam messages now” button?

I did. Two weeks ago. And that night, around 2 am, my international editor who was then covering Kentucky Derby at Louisville, USA, rang me up and shouted, “Why didn’t you put up the article I sent 11 hours ago?” I shot back that we didn’t receive any such mail. His mail was tucked in the Spam counter, which I deleted.

Some friends suggested using one of the commercially available anti-spam packages, like POP File, eXpurgate, SpamPal, MailWasher Pro, or Spamihilator. There you mention the spammers whom you want to block. But not only that’s a tedious exercise, but how will that stop spamming from ME.

Yesterday, I received 6 e-mails, where I offered to myself free magazines, low-interest loans and cheap Viagra. Spammers now use my e-mail address (possibly password too) and send me mails.

Innovative indeed.

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