Jerry Wilson Over Coffee Appearing each Wednesday in the Edinburgh Courier, the weekly newspaper in Edinburgh, Indiana and periodically in Indiana's Daily Journal newspaper.

Daily Journal Column, January 19, 2001

I Hate Spam

I really hate spam.

Now, before any of the lunch meat junkies out there get the wrong impression, I’m not talking about SPAM, with all capital letters—that much-maligned concoction of the Hormel Company. I’m talking about spam, with lower-case letters, the colloquial expression used for junk e-mail that is used to solicit products, services, and scams over the Internet. It’s what constantly harasses me every time I log on to my Internet account. I like SPAM, but I detest spam.

The etymology of the term comes from a Monty Python comedy sketch that takes place in a restaurant. Singing Vikings continually drown out the waitress as she tries to read from the menu, in which everything includes SPAM. Likewise, spam e-mail, because of its ubiquity, drowns out the bona fide e-mail. SPAM, the meat, got its name from a contest held when it was first canned in 1937. It’s a contraction of “spiced ham.” The winner received $100; the lunch meat got a place in history.

But unlike the meat, the other spam has no redeeming qualities whatever. It is a nuisance, plain and simple. It ranks up there with telemarketers and the old-fashioned form of junk mail that clogs your mailbox.

Still, I believe spam is even more malevolent than the physical junk mail. For one thing, if you don’t want to read the postal junk, you can just toss it in the trash. Spam e-mail consumes more of your time while you read enough of it to decide if it’s legitimate or not.

Secondly, there are some people who even make good use out of the junk mail they get from the post office. I remember seeing a news story once about a man who purposely signed on to every mailing list he could find, so that he could get tons of junk mail each year. He had a wood-burning stove, so he rolled the junk mail into “logs” to burn as free fuel.

You can’t do that with spam. Although I would love to figure out a way to burn it.

I probably get several dozen spam messages every day. Some days I may get more than 100. It’s safe to say that I get more spam messages than legitimate ones.

There are a finite number of seconds in each day. It takes, say, ten seconds to open a piece of spam and read enough of it to decide that it really is junk. And if you get 100 spams a day, that’s 1000 seconds—almost 17 minutes a day wasted! And it will only get worse.

Another negative aspect of spam is that it uses up valuable Internet bandwidth. Those of you who surf the Net know that the connection speed gets bogged down quite a bit, thanks to the heavy cyber-traffic. When someone sends out 10,000 junk e-mail messages all at once, that just adds to the congestion.

I can’t see how sending spam to potential customers would be a very effective marketing tool, anyway. Personally, I don’t read any more of them than I have to. As soon as I see I’m being solicited, I trash it. Plus, even if I were interested in what the spammer was selling, I wouldn’t buy it from him. He annoyed me when he sent me the spam, so I’m not giving him my business.

Still, it can be somewhat amusing to see the evolution of techniques used by spammers to grab your attention. One of the latest gimmicks is to put an “Re:” at the beginning of the subject line. That’s e-mail terminology meant to let you know that the message is a reply from someone to whom you had sent a message previously. Then there are the spams that pretend to be a personal greeting from a friend, or a personal message from a stranger that was sent to you in error . The ruses used to get you to read spam are endless.

Laws against spam are probably not in the foreseeable future. After all, it is a form of speech that is protected by the First Amendment. It’s annoying, but there’s not much one can do about it legally.

The only thing that might eventually diminish the promulgation of spam is for the recipients to always ignore the solicitations. Never, ever, under any circumstances purchase any product or service from a company that solicits business using spam. If you desire the product or service, buy it from a competing business.

It might take some time, but if nobody ever responded favorably to a spammer’s solicitations, the spammers would eventually get the message that sending unsolicited messages using e-mail mailing lists isn’t good business.

Copyright © 2001 by Jerry Wilson.