I Hate Spam: A Rant

I Hate Spam - screenshot of email inbox with spam folder showing 4368 emails in it

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I awoke this morning to 100 new emails, which is pretty typical for a weekday.  Unfortunately, about half of them weren’t actually addressed to me.  Another handful made absolutely no sense.  I even got this one today:

 

 

Riverside Grill has become 15922574 our favorite local breakfast restaurant (we have not had the pleasure of dining here for lunch or dinner yet, 15922574 but it’s on our to-do list).  The restaurant is pretty small, 15922574 so there is a possibility that there will occasionally be a 15-20 minute wait.  Let me tell you though??? 15922574 it’s worth the wait!

Their breakfast 15922574 is not your ordinary diner food, not your typical eggs 15922574 and bacon type of breakfast.  Don’t get me wrong, 15922574 they do serve all of the breakfast staples, however, 15922574 they also serve unique breakfasts, such as: the Oaxaca Burrito, which is cactus scrambled in eggs with beans, tomato, cilantro, onion, cotija cheese 15922574 & avocado; homemade salsa or pico de gallo; 15922574 and Marbelous Sunrise, which is saut??ed spinach, portabella mushrooms, corn & zucchini, side of egg whites, avocado & tomato with salsa, 15922574 whole wheat artisan bread or corn tortillas.  Also, they grill their sourdough bread instead of toasting, 15922574 which is flavorful and has the perfect mixture of crunch and chewy.  Their food is flavorful and satisfying; 15922574 you won’t leave here hungry.

I have no idea what that means, but it left me with a craving for Mexican like you wouldn’t believe.  Thanks a lot, assholes!  Truth be told, I’m frustrated.  Every single day, I take time out of my day to unsubscribe to each and every one of these stupid emails.  And every single morning, they’re back.

 

Giving the Gift of Spam

But, do you want to hear something amazing?  I have been randomly selected for my own sizzling-hot Russian bride.  I noticed that this morning when I was busy unsubscribing.  My first thought was, “Can she cook?”  If so, I might just consider it.  Oh, and I have won at least 25 Amazon gift cards this week.  All I need to do is fill out a form with all of my personal information, including my social security number, to claim them.  I’m one lucky girl.

Unfortunately, Doctor Oz must think I have awful skin because he emails me about it all fucking day long.  I really wish he would stop because it makes me feel like shit.  Between that and the constant emails about losing belly fat, my self-esteem has been severely compromised.  But at least I have the option to refinance my home at 1.5%.  Oh, and I totally won 10 free replacement windows from Home Depot.  That makes me feel better.  And if I’m still feeling down on myself, I now know where I can get Vicodin for $1.90 each.  So there’s that.

I Hate Spam

I don’t understand why any company thinks emailing me twenty times a day is going to somehow seal the deal.  I mean, has harassing your customers ever worked?  Come on.  Oh, and I admittedly go bat-shit crazy when a spam email makes it way 4 pages deep into my email account.  Has that ever happened to you?  You know what’s on my mind while I’m looking for one of those guys?  Murder. 

There is no point to this blog post, except that I plan to email it back to every person who sends me spam email from this point forward.  I also want to hear about your favorite (or worst) spam email moment.  Please share in the comments!

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51 Comments

  1. Unfortunately the problem with spam is it only takes one naive person out of 10 million to click on the link to make it profitable for the spammers. What e-mail provider are you using? I haven’t had an issue with gmail for awhile.

    1. Yeah, I mainly use the email associated with my website. It does have a spam filter but the settings aren’t helpful at all.

  2. Like William, I’ve found gmail does a great job of weeding out spam, and as for marketing emails that I have signed up for (things like Groupon, Enterprise, etc), I auto-filter them into separate subfolders and only open them up if I need the most recent coupon code for a purchase.

    1. Yeah, I’ve tried to filter my email through another provider but the email account through my blog doesn’t translate over very well. I think it’s because its cheap!

  3. Ditto the gmail spam filter. It is pretty darn smart.

    My biggest pet peeve right now is multiple PF bloggers and their freaking auto-tweets. I get it, someone wrote has a new post and you’re their friend/follower and it’s nice to share, so you share it because that’s what the program is automatically set up to do. But since I follow only PF bloggers that means I end up with at least 15 links to the same post. It’s just a wall. And then I generally end up ignoring it because it pissed me off.

    1. I had to turn Twitter off on my phone- not because I don’t want to get tweets from people, but for the same reasons you’ve mentioned.

  4. This cracked me up. I hate spam too, but these days not much of it makes it to my inbox because of spam filters. I hate spam comments on my blog because sometimes the spam filter catches legit comments- I try to go through once a day or so to make sure there are no legit comments in there. But that’s kinda time consuming.

  5. I used to use a very lovely small email provider that was awesome. Then I realized they funny domain name for my email wasn’t very professional, so I switched to gmail. They do a solid job filtering out spam (like others have said). It is just a shame google is becoming evil and will most likely cause the robot-apocolypse (which is way scarier than a zombie apocolypse)

    1. I did hook my email up to gmail at one point, but it didn’t work very well. It might be time to try again!

      1. I didn’t have any luck hooking up my website email to gmail. It’s supposed to work, but nothing ever came through. Eventually I just switched to a gmail account. At my job though they setup all of our company emails through gmail, but with our old email addresses, and it worked seamlessly. But I think they somehow contracted with Google to make that switch happen.

  6. Do you get the emails requesting you wire money to your friend who is stuck in another country and can’t get home? Or what about the emails in Chinese? I am absolutely NOT bilingual in any form…ha ha!

  7. I hate spam too. I use google which does a decent job at controlling it but some do slip by. It is really weird to think someone is out there typing away and sending all of these emails.

    1. I know. I can’t imagine that they get very many customers out of it.

  8. But don’t you want to know the Secret of Oprah’s weight loss?. I think unsubscribing only let’s them know that the address is valid, and therefore more spam !!!!

    1. That’s what my husband says, but I feel like unsubscribing works. If I hadn’t unsubscribed to most of them, I would be getting hundreds of spam per day by this point.

    2. LeRainDrop says:

      Ditto. Using the “unsubscribe” for most spam only notifies them that they’ve reached a valid email address, so they should keep sending more and sell that email address to others. Legit companies (hard to define, but hopefully you know what I mean) do a better job with respecting the “unsubscribe” request because of the federal regulations in place.

  9. I stopped using the email through my website for this exact reason. But then I’m super paranoid about not checking it. What if somewhere in those 10 pages of spam is a real message? What if someone thinks I’m ignoring them? What if I missed changing my email address somewhere to the gmail account? The same with the comments on the blog. When I see that the filter caught 87 spam comments, and there are 0 real comments, I start to worry that the spam filter isn’t working right, and real comments aren’t getting through.

    1. Yeah, I hear ya. I just want real emails and comments, but it’s hard to get the settings just right. I had a huge spam problem on my website a few months ago. I was literally getting 10,000 spam per day. My husband updated some plug-in though and it fixed it.

  10. Mine gets filtered pretty well, but if I ever look at the spam filter, I am amazed at how many ethnic groups are looking for mates, hot Asian singles, big black chicks, Russian singles. Too bad I’m not in the market!

    1. HA! Yeah, I know. I wonder who formulates those emails. Weirdos!

  11. I’ll jump on the Gmail bandwagon and say that a spam email hasn’t made its way to my Inbox in a long, long while. Its pretty amazing. Sometimes I go to my Spam folder just for a laugh – apparently there are hot, sexy singles in my area just waiting for ME.

  12. It’s not so much spam, but Bed, Bath, and Beyond reminds me daily that I haven’t used my 20% of coupon yet and hurry hurry hurry before it expires, but we all know it never does!

  13. This would be hysterical, but I get a lot of the same stupid spam emails as well. You get a little more than I do, and thankfully gmail catches quite a few of them but it’s just crazy ridiculous. My latest favorite one was an email from some company that started the email by telling me that they knew I was a busy woman…because John is totally a woman’s name. Then the stupid company proceeded to email me like 6-8 more times with the same freaking email. I wanted to climb through the screen and strangle someone!

    1. The least they could do is try to tailor the email to you in some way, like at least know you’re not a woman.

  14. Unfortunately, sometimes when you unsubscribe from a site, it’s their way of knowing that you’re there, so they keep sending more crap. Unless it’s a reputable site, the best way is to just block by address, domain or keyword. The best way I found to manage my spam is to never click any links in an email – always copy and paste into a browser, so they don’t know where you’re coming from. And if you’re using webmail, always paste the link into a separate window. Although I get quite a bit of emails every day, I’ve been fortunate enough to have very limited spam.

    1. My ability to block emails is incredibly limited. I’ll have to try again once I start filtering my email through a third party again.

  15. Hey Holly and thanks for a fun, albeit a drag for you, post!

    The problem with email SPAM is that if it wasn’t making someone money, it wouldn’t continue. It’s the law of averages…a gazillion SPAM messages sent out yields at least a bunch of positive results which makes the cycle continue! And unfortunately, emailing a reply will most likely get you on another SPAM list because they know there’s somebody at your email address!!

    I am surprised at Dr.Oz however and he really should rethink his email strategy!

    Take care and good luck. My best to all.

    Lyle

    1. I know. Someone must be signing up for sizzling hot Russian brides!

  16. Yea I hate spam…apparently I keep getting inheritances for people I don’t know. Why do they keep wanting to give me money. There was actually an attorney in Wisconsin who fell for a Nigerian prince inheritance scam and used some of his clients money to get this inheritance…I think he was suspended or disbarred.

  17. Apparently I have met the criteria for that much spam. I occasionally receive 3-4 on my website, but it has been a while. I heard if you unsubscribe you ar eput on a list for even more. It may be one of the reasons for your hugh number.

    1. People keep saying that but I’m not sure if it’s true. Unsubscribing seems to work with some of them, but not with others. I wish I knew ahead of time!

  18. Spam does prove to be a nuisance. Your time could be well spent writing a million dollar blog than spending half a day unsubscribing to stuff that you did not subscribe in the first place. Isn’t there an anti-spam software to prevent that? i know my yahoo mail has one. Also my personal and business/work email is separate.

    1. I do have a spam filter but it doesn’t work good enough!

  19. I burst out laughing at the Russian bride, “can she cook” reference? I have a love-hate relationship with how gmail now filters promotional emails into another tab. I miss important things, but it keeps my inbox from looking spammed.

    1. I am going to try transitioning to gmail again. First I need to clean out my gmail account. A lot of crazy stuff is ending up in that account too!

  20. Clicking on the unsubscribe link just gets you more spam. Just ignore them – mark them as spam through your mail reader (or whatever other process your mail provider asks) and otherwise judiciously use the delete key.

    If your mail provider isn’t helping you stop the spam before it gets to your inbox – change! There are several hundred free/cheap mail providers – vote with your dollars and go elsewhere. (I personally use fastmail.fm – but that’s because I’m familiar with the mail server software they use and they’re really active in its development.)

    1. I obviously know that there are free email services out there. Unfortunately, I am tied to my main email for several reasons. I have tried routing it through gmail before and had problems, but it might be time to try again!

  21. This cracked me up!! I swear when you cut off one head, TWO grow back!!! I think unsubscribing has actually subscribed me to other, worse things! ugh!

  22. Agreed! I recently started my blog, and I have been getting spam comments everyday! They got me excited for a second until I realized they were spams…

  23. Another vote for don’t unsubscribe, especially the really scammy ones like Russian Brides and “a very critical thing you didn’t know about weight loss”. If you can’t get the filtering to work on the server it might be worth using Thunderbird or Outlook and have them filter out spam on your computer.

  24. Tara @ Streets Ahead Living says:

    I work at a Catholic high school, in the alumni department so my work email address is on our website for alums to contact me. Because my email address is up there, I get so much spam daily. I get spam for ASHLEY MADISON at my Catholic school job! It’s like, come on, do you think I’d want to join a dating website for cheating spouses at my Catholic school job?

    So I get you about spam. It is annoying and never seems to end!

  25. Haha wow that really is a terrible spam email, Holly. My spam is currently somewhat under control, and unfortunately I do have to check each email in my gmail account because I’ve had a number go to spam that I needed to respond to and that weren’t actually spam.

  26. Pretty much the only spam emails I get are the ones offering me millions of dollars if I’ll just give them my bank account number and routing number so they can transfer the cash. Oh, how I wish it were true. 🙂

  27. The worst to me is in the comments on my blog! Drives me crazy.

    I have plugins to avoid it, but I still go through it occasionally and it makes me mad when I do…maybe I should stop. lol

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