I hate spam. I SO intensely HATE spam that even though I have filters up and even though I know I should let it go, I SO hate spam that I sometimes respond to the spammer.

I HATE spam. It has gotten so much worse in recent months and it’s so time-consuming and annoying and rude and tedious and I really really HATE people who send spam.

I hate junk mail, but I’m off most lists for catalogues and solicitations. I actually write EVERY time I make a donation and say “do not put me on any mailing lists with this donation” and I get royally pissed off when they do. What I dislike the most is when I send a one-time memorial donation and nine months later I’m getting newsletters from some organization that I specifically said “do not send me any newsletters or any other mailings.” And it takes three emails and a phone call to get it to stop.

Mind you, one of my volunteer jobs is to ensure that people get take off the mailing list; I help maintain the database for a non-profit so I know how it’s done. I only know this database, but I’ve seen other donation databases and I’ve talked to lots of customer service people and all databases have ways to ensure that someone is not added to a mailing list. I usually send a polite note once. What’s cute is when I use the specified email on someone’s website and it BOUNCES. That gets me mad.

We never got junk mail the way we get junk email. I never had to clear 10 envelopes out of my mailbox for every one legit magazine, or whatever. But between the Viagra, the overwhelming mail laundering schemes, the phishing from dogturds trying to steal from people, scammers pretending to solicit for charity – those are especially welcome when they mention “God” or “Christ” in the subject line, the offers for software, nvestment opportunities, business opportunities, drugs, IT and computer services, jobs, dates, porn, home loans and mortgages, penis enlargers and girlfriends, I am fed up, angry and sick to death of it.

I don’t like getting mad every day when I go into my mailbox and clear out the 75 out of 85 emails that are sitting there because 70 of them are spams and 5 of them are notices of mail failures. I don’t respond to emails unless they’re Nigerian fundraiser types; then I have a little message I send that makes me feel better. It’s nasty. It’s crude and ugly and angry and I feel better sending it because I think spammers are scum and I think if they have the rude nerve to disturb me for one second of my life, I get to tell them all the evil I hope befalls them. I consider it healthy – not as healthy as going over to the PAWS adoption center and looking at the kittens (ooooooooo) but I HATE spam SO MUCH that I feel like I need to do something or my head will blow off.

I have trouble sitting. My back, hip, legs, and hands hurt almost daily, so using a computer is something that, while I adore it, and the link it provides to the world, can cause me actual honest to go physical pain. So spending the first 10 minutes of my computer day deleting stinking garbage makes me really pissy. I try most of the time JUST to delete it, not read it. I do try. And we have a filter and I add items TO our filtering systems hourly, not daily, but hourly. Every time I download email, which is many times a day, I get spammed.

I suppose I should be kinder, then, to the jerks who send “well-meaning” spam. The political campaigner who sent me “dear Andi” email although I do not know her, and did not every give anyone the ok to send me email and whose email was – whether I agreed or not with the cause - insufferable. The job services that apparently cruise monster.com and try to find people for their job listing services; services that I find, btw, inevitably cannot spell and whose “clients” cannot provide a listing without a typographical error. The advertisers – the creeps who apparently spend their days surfing the net to find websites so they can offer their “services” - ads to make your website “pay for itself”. The event organizers who send you stuff weeks after you write to protest you don’t want any mail from them. And yes, I know that taking someone off the mailing list is a low priority in legit organizations. But I have no idea why when someone writes angrily and says “take me off your mailing list:” someone can’t go into that there program on that there computer and FIX IT. It takes under a minute and a half. You could time me.

I HATE SPAM. I think people who send 99.8 percent of all unsolicited emails are evil nasty and wrong-headed. I do not think that being well-meaning applies here. It’s an abuse. It’s a way around the “do not call” list but it’s far worse; the scam level is higher. Just since I began writing this blog entry, I downloaded email and got at LEAST eight spams. And I type quickly (ok with a dinner break I admit!) But maybe what, two hours and my trash file has NINE fresh spam messages. Only some of which the filter got. Wait. TEN.

So when someone plaintively complains to a friend that I was MEAN when I sent a snarky rude email to her to say “who the hell are you and how dare you spam me?” gee, how weird. This friend, who shall remain nameless to protect her from hassles, sent on something to me from someone who was just devastated to get mean horrid email from me. After she spammed me with a “fundraiser.” I do not know this person, never heard of her in my life, have no reason whatsoever to be interested in “fundraising” items, and she hit me on a day when I had HAD it. Most days. But she was HURT. I did not keep the original but referred to it as illiterate – which, the way I am, probably means it had at least 5 typos or was simply impossible to comprehend because it was written so poorly. One typo is not illiteracy – but if you’re selling crap, you should be able to spell, I think.

And this person wrote my friend – not knowing that this friend knows me – a relatively illiterate email about how mean I was and how I couldn’t be a nice person. I think – seriously, literacy was a problem here. Like the sentence that read in its entirety “You pretend so you don't have to be inreality [sic].” This is like the spammer who, after I called her/him names wrote back and said essentially “so you don’t want to invest in my million dollar scheme?”

Are people functionally illiterate? Do they not understand that they have sent unwanted junk to someone who does not want it? Do they really think they have the right to do this? AND the right to be hurt that someone got mad at their sending unwanted emails to a total stranger? Where do they get the notion that this behavior is okay?

I KNOW I should just let it go. I can’t. It offends me. It is horrible and awful and takes up my time that I would rather spend doing something that matters. And we all know the real problem which is that no matter how smart the filter, it once in a HUGE while will dump a legit email. So I can’t even say “I’ll get a better filter” though I wouldn’t mind getting one. But I still have to go in and LOOK before I dump all the garbage. Every day. I wish I could be mellow about it and shrug it off. Do you? How do you DO that?

I really really really hate spam. No, really.

Next post. Kittens. I promise.