"Look, can I have the eggs, bacon, sausage and spam without the spam?"
My story is the story of everyone who owns an e-mail account: each morning, while sifting through messages from contacts that arrived during the night, I delete about two times that number in unsolicited e-mails from undistinguishable sources like johnny 341 qwwxxxuritw, regarding indecipherable subject headings like And will she want the organ?. There's the licentious crowd, the easy money crowd, the vacation-for-two crowd, the crowd who has managed to randomly generate inconspicuous names of people I've nonetheless never heard of, and then the "fine art" website or webring that continually badgers me to plunk down for a John Singer Sargent - or, alternatively, submit my own work. Over the course of an average workday, I'll continue to be offered worthless purported products. I've heard some horror stories about a hundred or more junk mail arrivals; I receive less than twenty between four addresses.
That doesn't mean I'm not driven straight up the wall. I do not request any of these messages; none of my money has been set aside for patronage and, for fear of tapping a viral message, I've never actually opened one of the little scraps. In fact, just yesterday I warily scoped out a soliciation message from Orion's Blue Book, with whom I've done legitimate business in the past and from whom I might expect follow-up correspondance; unfortunately for the Blue Book, the message failed to scream "Orion Blue Book, Not to Worry!" and, thanks to the jokers flooding inboxes with disingenuous references to professional personal business, was nearly deleted.
That nearly crossed the line. I won't say that I'm not inordinately infuriated by spam - it's just that I'm too busy with far more important matters to devote an ounce of brains to the problem when I can effortlessly click twice and be done with the rubbish.
And I'm not entirely convinced that spamming will outlive its unquestionable unprofitability. I've seen the death of productless aggressive advertising: groups of two or three well dressed, fiendishly attractive, college-aged men or women would canvas office buildings in the hopes of browbeating or seducing, respectively, members of the opposite sex in order to build an array of targets for more solicitiation. We never gave them an inch - the girls or the guys - and two years ago, their kind of bad business vanished.
Good riddance (though I'd be happy to meet the women on better terms elsewhere). I have faith that spamming - really, a modern incarnation of the pushy merchant - will fall flat on its face as year after year shows a lack of commercial success; volume of exposure must eventually meet the brass tacks of sales. So while I protest not a bit to see heavy-handed regulation thrown in the face of businesses spending far more time devising methods of violating correspondance traffic than building an irresistable product, I expect to see the institutionalized harassment expire on its own.
Before it's replaced by something else, of course. But we're given a breather in between.