<rant>
OK, I want to know who you are. I want to know which of you are actually stupid enough to think that purchasing real estate, refinancing your house, or making any major investment because of some random e-mail you received is actually a good idea. I want to know which of you feels so insecure that you are compelled to respond to promotional e-mails for “male enhancement.” I want to know how many of you suckers really believe that you’re going to get something for next to nothing, because next to nothing is what you will receive.
I want to know who you are so that I can do whatever it takes to permanently disconnect you from e-mail and the Internet. You’re obviously not clever enough to parse through the junk. Those of you who are stupid enough to respond make life online difficult for the rest of us. Spammers know that even just a small percentage of gullibility makes the millions of messages sent via e-mail and comments posted to blogs worth their time. Just stop responding to them. Right now. I mean it!
I know that spammers have gotten more clever. In fact, I had a spammer post a comment to this blog just today that looked quite reasonable. It even looked like it had actually responded to one of my posts, rather than being some bot-driven contrivance. However, when I actually checked the link, the site was sponsored by “Make Money Online” dot com. Even if it looks reasonable, do some due diligence. Check it out, but don’t given them any more information or reason to encourage them in their activities.
Annually I spend about $15,000 for spam, malware, and virus filters for our school district. That’s public taxpayer money I’d much rather spend on students in the classroom than on filtering out garbage. My personal filter here has caught almost 50,000 spam comments on this blog alone since I installed the filters. Even with that, some still get through, and we still have to deal with e-mail and blog spam manually. More time and money wasted.
So just think about this. The next time you feel compelled to respond to an offer that looks like a great deal, or you click on some stupid pop-up on a web page, or you click on a silly little blinking game link on a website, remember that you are encouraging spammers. Remember the money you are diverting from other resources by giving spammers reason to exist.
</rant>