Thursday, May 19, 2005

This Is Getting Out Of Hand

Like everyone else out in the virtual world, I am constantly inundated with junk email trying to get me to buy everything from bail bonds to viagra. Lately I've been getting about 10 emails a day offering cheap Cialis. Seems everytime I open my email I see something on the subject line promising that if I use their product, my "member will get rock hard and stay that way for hours!". I've gotten ads for pretty much every kind of porn you can imagine, from celebrities to animals. By now, I've learned to just delete them and have pretty much accepted that as long as there is email, I will always receive such crap.

But this is getting out of control.

This morning, upon opening my Gmail account, I was greeted with an email from some company called ZTX Entertainment or some generic name like that. With Gmail, you can see most of the first sentence in the email under the subject line, so imagine my shock when I glanced at it and saw what it said:

RAPE PHOTOS $29.95! RAPE, VIOLENT SEXUAL ACTS, (Here's where it got cut off)

WTF?!

Are there really people out there that are selling - and BUYING - this stuff?! Now, I've been around the world, have seen my share of sleaze, and am certainly not naive, but...I'm at a loss. Imagine your kids receiving this email. Sometimes I weep for the future.

Rik

8 comments:

Kitty said...

I get slimed, too. I used to get e-mail with "horny little girls and barnyard animals" in the SUBJECT line! When I was growing up, my mother worried about me learning about Bardot and Monroe; now we worry about where we can buy decent looking clothing for girls. Every store promotes slut-wear for the pigtail set.

Ed said...

Here in the US there has been talk of a no spam law much like the Do Not Call list but it will be awhile before it gets passed.

The only way I have found to avoid them is to be judicious in putting your email address out on the web where people can google them and to change email address's every couple years. The latter works really well.

Anonymous said...

I remember how appalled I was the first time I got spam offering "CP" - I learned to my horror, after naively opening the message, that it was for "Child Porn".

I've adopted a tack similar to ed abbey's to avoid the spam in my personal email - by having a separate email address that I use for public forums, mailing lists and the like, and keeping my personal email address really personal.

Rik said...

Actually, what I did was create a "junk email" account that I usually use for stuff online. That way 90% of the junk email I get goes to that one. I check it every so often just to ensure that I didn't miss anything important.

However, it's not just stuff that you do online, it also anything that someone who has emailed you does. These bastard companies use email strings to capture addresses.

Unfortunately I don't think it'll ever be stopped unless maybe some powerful Senator's young child starts receiving this stuff. Then it will become more of an urgent issue for the people in charge...

Rik

Anonymous said...

It would really help too if people just started using email with a bit more common sense. One of my pet peeves is getting a forwarded email that's been sent to me AND to 20 other people by someone who didn't hide the addresses or put them in the Bcc: field.

Spammers get many of their "live" email addresses from these sources for one thing. In addition, there are actually recorded scams because of this - scammers take two random names from all those emails, assume those two know each other, then send a message to Person 1 saying "Hi, you don't know me but Person 2 told me to get in touch with you because you might be interested in xyz."

Rik said...

You are so right, there are fewer things in this world that I HATE more than getting those stupid emails that people forward to 100 people. Especially the ones about "Being my friend" or crap like that.

NOTE TO EVERYONE - NEVER SEND ME ANY OF THAT CRAP! I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN!

Rik

Ed said...

....and there is nothing wrong with that!

Kitty said...

Forwarding also is the most common method of spreading viruses. NEVER fprward; copy'n'paste into a new e-mail.