I am deep into my coding...Get input from laser, check position of robotic arm, get conveyor speed..
Suddenly I hear the sound of an arrow..THWWWWIIIIPPPPPTTTTT - Message For You Sir!
It is my email alert, I climb out from the depths of my code to check my email. I have to do this as I support clients globally and due to the language barriers some of my support sites find it easier to communicate via email. I am not suggesting my clients can't speak english, they can very well but just imagine a someone with a Spanish or Japanese Accent trying to talk to someone with a thick Southern accent.....
I open my email and what do I find?
One of those syrupy sweet emails that go along the lines of "Are you my friend? Forward this to 10 people including the sender of those who are important in your life"
I sigh and rub my face, I can't BELIEVE I just broke my concentration for this! The problem with this type of email is that the recipient usually feels obligate to answer! "Oh, [sender] is a friend and I don't want to offend them so I better reply back!" The recipient then has to come up with 9 other people to bother and reply back.
I replied back along with some other email names and dove back into my coding, lets see where were we...ah yes, Get input from laser, check position of robotic arm, get conveyor speed..
THWWWWIIIIPPPPPTTTTT - Message For You Sir!
Huh? Again I climb out of the pool and there is the SAME EMAIL FROM one of the people on the earlier list!
YOU'VE GOT SPAM!
It is amazing how many spam emails clog up peoples in box. I read somewhere some email users report that spam represents over 50% of the emails they receive each and every day!
Now, the company I work for has invested in some sort of spam firewall (their wording, not mine) which supposedly blocks a large amount of spam. Apparently the blocker checks each and every email coming in from the outside and decides if they are legit or not. Since the firewall was
put into place the amount of Spam I get has greatly decreased but I still get advertisements telling me to work from home or a hot new investment guaranteed to make me a millionaire.
The investment ones amuse me, if someone really had found an investment guaranteed to make them a millionaire do you think they would send out an email telling others how to get in on it?
The emails that annoy me the most are the ones saying "Lost Child Alert!" or "Child Dying Of Cancer!" which then detail instructions for you to forward this email to everyone you know (with a copy to the sender) in order to find this child OR help this child reach a goal in order for them to get a prize.
These emails are generally started by spammers. The reason they do this is if you FORWARD an email your email address is sent along with everyone elses email you included! And...since the instructions told you to send a copy to the sender this person now has a ton of email addresses he can sell to companies for them to send spam.
In order to stop this nonsense, I generally check web sites such as breakthechain.org, snopes.com, or urbanlegends.about.com. %99.99 of the time the "Child Dying" or "Lost Child" emails are indeed hoaxes and I forward the information to people I know.
Another method I use to fight spam is to never use my work email account when signing onto a web site. I have a yahoo email account I use for registration that I check from time to time simply to clean out the spam it gets.
Oh, I stopped the "Are you my friend" messages, I simply replied to everyone and told them "Yes you all are my friends and I plan to come by and give a big kiss and hug to the next one who sends me this!" Oddly enough, no-one has replied!
SouthernProgrammer(02/15/2008)
HAD - I am not sure what firewall the techie boys are using. I'm far removed from that these days. Outlook can be a memory pig, but I've found that 2 Gigs of ram is the sweetspot on computers running Windows XP.
UnsupportedSupport(03/18/2008)
We receive a lot of these in the office and they used to send them to me along with everyone else. After researching snopes.com(etc.) I would usually inform them they are forwarding falsehoods and should research before they send. Also informing them that they were opening themselves up to spam, which they receive a very large amount of these days and stupidly wonder why. The result is that they took me off of their forwarding lists. They still send that crap because they will never learn, but at least I don't have to deal with it on a daily basis. On the plus side, a few of them will actually research before sending anything pretending to be factual.
BPFH(03/23/2008)
Okay, I'm being pedantic here, I know that, but when a company actually shows *restraint* instead of simply suing everyone who uses their trademark to describe something undesirable (like unsolicited commercial and/or bulk email), I do try to respect their wishes.
In this case, your day wasn't affected by SPAM. SPAM is made by Hormel, which does not, to the best of my knowledge, send spam. (They do send SPAM, but that involves the USPS or a package service, not email. :))
http://www.spam.com/legal/spam/
That having been said, I get a LOT more spam at work than I do at home.
The provider I use at home uses "greylisting", which issues a temporary bounce message for any email with a combination of sender, recipient, and I *think* domain used in the HELO/EHLO command in SMTP, that it hasn't seen before. Most spam mailers apparently don't retry when they get one of those bounces. Two or three spams a day is about the limit of what I get, which is fairly remarkable given that my email address is posted in the clear on my website.
Work has two layers officially--SpamAssassin running on Linux servers that buffer our Exchange servers from the rest of the Internet, and something from Trend Micro that's updated along with our antivirus software. I've also added SpamBayes for my local Outlook installation. Usually I get 10-15 spams, most of which are correctly labeled spam by one level or another of my filtering. The occasional false-positive is, of course, inevitable...
Oh, and I think I FINALLY managed to break my father of the habit of sending out those ever-wonderful hoax emails. Either that or he realized that sending them to *me* would only get him a response that said, essentially, "Snopes says you're wrong, see?"
SouthernProgrammer(03/23/2008)
BPFH - I agree with you that Hormel shows restraint.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/s/spam.html
Another school of thought maintains that [The Name Spam] comes from the computer group lab at the University of Southern California who gave it the name because it has many of the same characteristics as the lunchmeat Spam:
1. Nobody wants it or ever asks for it.
2. No one ever eats it; it is the first item to be pushed to the side when eating the entree.
3. Sometimes it is actually tasty, like 1% of junk mail that is really useful to some people
BPFH(03/26/2008)
HADND: I wouldn't be surprised in the least. I've never actually had it myself. My closest brush with SPAM... well, on the last day of my first year at university (actually my sophomore year) when the Geisert Hall cafeteria was open, they served--and I am not in the least bit joking--SPAM nuggets.
I went straight to the salad bar.
HaveADamnNiceDay(03/27/2008)
I put spam up there with sardines, anchovies, and canned corned beef. There are some foods you should never put in a can.... maybe all foods. I refuse to eat any canned foods, except for soup...
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