Why is spam so annoying? Quite simple:
The currently overwhelming amount of spam is an annoyance to everybody. How would you feel if a parade of salesmen came knocking on your door every day, and most of the same ones kept coming back time after time? Or if your phone rang all day and night with sales calls? Would you put up with salespeople jumping in front of you waving sales flyers in your face every time you walked down the street? Isn’t unsolicited e-mail just another version of this type of rude intrusion?
For people who work on the internet, spam creates even more of a problem. If you have a physical (non-internet) business, most likely you have put a No Soliciting sign on your door and hired a secretary to screen your visitors and phone calls. If you didn’t, salespeople would interrupt you on a regular basis, wasting your time and impeding your ability to run an efficient office. When an internet marketer has to stop work and check mail to find 10, 20, maybe 50 pieces of junk per day, day after day, this marketer’s ability to earn a living has been impaired. The spammer’s cry of just hit delete doesn’t wash when you know you have to take the time to load all your mail into your reader, scan through it to find the messages you DO want to receive, and then delete the junk. And what if you’re out of town, dialing in long distance on your laptop? It is a waste of time, a waste of resources, a waste of bandwidth – and, therefore, a waste of money. YOUR money.
Some people feel that the reason the Spamwars has escalated to the highly emotional issue that it now represents is because of the type of commercial e-mail we all receive day after day. Fully 95% (if not more) of this junk consists of nothing more than pyramid schemes, get rich quick scams, offers to click here to see my bazooms (which appear just as often in the e-mail of an 8-year-old as they do an adult), and mailing lists or software tools to recruit more spammers. Not only that, but most of this spam is the SAME offers from countless different people, over and over again. The number of people claiming to be Christopher Erickson, Karen Liddell, or a retired attorney peddling pyramid schemes could populate a small town. Most of this stuff is so repetitive, those of us who spend much time on the internet can recite it by heart. And some spammers seem to believe that if they send the EXACT SAME SPAM to us 5, 20, or 100 times, we will somehow be hypnotized into buying it.
By Jer