>The next time you feel like bitching about a few spam emails finding their way to your inbox, stop a moment and spare a thought for poor Colin Wells, who receives around
44000 of the things every single day.
According to ClearMyMail, a company that appears to have saved this poor bastard’s internet life, his totals come out to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 16 million messagesabout the size of his penis and the money it can get if it helps the poor Nigerian per year.
Dan Field, managing director of ClearMyMail, explained that Wells became the particular target of spammers because he made the mistake of clicking on the unsubscribe links of spam emails when he first started using the account. “That just confirmed that the email address was active allowing spammers to sell on his details to other junk mailers, further increasing the amount of spam he was receiving,” Field told El Reg.
Between the 2 of us, Carin and I have said that exact thing to hundreds of people over the years. I think maybe 12 have listened. If writing this can bump us up a couple more, then my job is done.
And speaking of wasting keystrokes and talking to unflinching walls of dumb, I’ve noticed quite an uptick lately in the number of forwards I’m getting where people aren’t taking the time to either hide the addresses they’re sending to or strip out the ones that came before. Not only is failing to do both of these things inconsiderate to people’s privacy, but it’s a major pain in the ass having to scroll through 17 miles of everybody’s friends and family just to read a stupid joke about fluffy bunnies or some gay message about friendship candles. It’s also a major contributing factor to the amount of spam everybody’s getting, so please, take the 30 seconds required to use BCC and the cut and paste functions, you lazy pricks. They exist for better reasons than so you can ignore them.
If anybody needs further clarification on how to perform these simple tasks, you can find me at my desk sifting through dozens of gay friendship candles while praying for the strength not to commit a homicide.
Thank you and good day.