Running With Quills: ELIZABETH LOATHES SPAM

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Monday, January 29, 2007

ELIZABETH LOATHES SPAM

Yes, I know. Everybody hates spam.

But I really loathe it. The fact that I’m paying good money to let it appear—and then remove it—really chaps my ass.

Loads of crap keep landing in my website guestbook and favorite quotes pages.

Most of the messages are for porn sites.

Or sites guaranteeing an erection.

Or a yard-long penis.

Or knee-length mammary glands. (Really gals, have a little patience. Gravity will take care of it for free.)

Yes, I had spam filters in place.

Yes, I had sign-here-and-decipher-that blanks.

Yes, I had spam up the wazoo anyway. Unbelievable how many people have so little to do.

I finally decided that the spammers could crap out the spam faster than I could shovel it.

So I’m removing the truly interactive parts of my website.

What I’d really like to do is put a spammer under an elephant and wait for nature to take its course.

I ask you, do you honestly think ANYONE with internet capability has to be constantly spammed to know that a (frankly revolting) variety of porn is available on the Web?

25 Comments:

Karibear said...: My ISP has spam blockers, I have blockers and firewalls and virus detectors, and I STILL get it. I simply go through my email inbox and delete anything and everything I don't recognize. Even more than the porn spam, I can't believe so many people are so gullible as to go a website specified in an email requesting updated info for their credit cards. I'll admit that I applied for and got all of mine via the internet, but I did some substantial research first and went through the banks' websites. I've also gotten a slew of 'we need an update' messages from phony Ebay and PayPal websites. Those I forward to the appropriate place.

As for the porn thing, a friend of mine had a rather funny experience 9 or 10 years ago. He was a teacher in the high school, and some of his students were doing research on breast cancer. You guessed it - he did a search for 'breast' and came up with literally thousands of hits, none of which had anything at all to do with cancer research. He had to contact the central office immediately [he was using a school computer] and write up an incident report explaining what happened, how it happened, and why. And practically had to sign an oath in blood swearing he'd never do it again.

As for the elephant, there was a little 'circus' many years ago in our little town in Alaska which included an elephant. There were huge piles of you-know-what. An acquaintance got hold of a 5 gallon bucket full of it and took it back to their homestead on one of the outlying islands. She said she was going to spread it around at strategic points and see how the bears reacted. I never did hear what the results were, but I'd bet there were some very confused bears for awhile,; 10:28 PM
Stella said...: Kari: Are you aware of the case in which a female teacher has just been found guilty of exposing her students to Internet porn. I realize she had a jury of her peers but I think this is horsepucky (we do seem to be on a roll here) and she is no more to blame than your friend. The wretched stuff came up in a popup and she reported it immediately, but apparently that isn't washing with the courts. Whichever way it goes, I'm hoping for justice.

Ann, thank you for the great laugh, m'dear. I like a laugh just before I go to work at night.

One amazing thing to me is that I'm such a sterling character that very rich and well-connected people, deceased--have specified me as the recipient of their fortunes. And think, all I have to do to accept these windfalls is send along my bank account numbers, or similar.

Ahem, the gooeduck is cheating, Ann. Did I ever tell you that my daughter, Kirsten, chose the gooeduck as her "study" project at age 6. She had to make a large, three-dimentional example to hang from the classroom ceiling and, naturally, to do everything properly we made a trip to the Pike Place Market to purchase the biggest specimen we could find. This I was forced to keep in my freezer until the appointed day.

Unfortunately, the gooeduck is, without doubt, the most boring specimen to write a report on and after all that, poor Kirsten scored poorly on content! What the devil are you supposed to write about one of those things apart from the fact that it more or less just lies there, spitting from time to time, and it's unbelievably ugly?

Spam: I don't want a hundred different kinds of drugs, cheap or otherwise. I don't want pictures of huge breasts, or penises, or medication to make penises stand up, together with instructions of what to do to get them down again if they stay up for more than four hours. Also, I don't give a fig about making penises bigger, so they can keep those products and the nasty ads out of my box. "Hot" teenage sex . . . Nope, I'm stopping, it goes straight downhill and I'm already almost at the bottom.

It's all disgusting and I'm furious that despite all the filters and fuss this elephant doo-doo keeps piling into my office.

Stella; 1:26 AM
DFender said...: Somehow I don't think you're gonna find a single person here that will argue with you, Betty. Are there really people out there that enjoy getting SPAM? Okay, maybe the people with erectile problems or tiny gooeducks. Then again, I could always forward them some of my SPAM.

Happy H...er...Wednesday...

Deb; 3:21 AM
Theresa N. said...: Spammers are awful. Wish someone could do something about them.
That's terrible about the teachers. I once called a 800 number, unfortunely I hint the 9 intstead. You guessed it ended up talking to a 900 porn number. I hung up as soon as I realized what I had done. The telephone company didn't believe me when I said it was an accident. Talk about embarrassed.; 5:24 AM
Anonymous said...: I got rid of SPAM for a very short time when I switched to a new ISP and got a new email address. It lasted until the first time I registered at a site. And despite all the anti-spam software, filters, etc., some SPAM still slimes its way through.

Oh, the porn. Our children's computer couldn't access the internet with the parental filters active so we "trusted" our 12 year old son and his friend. All I can say is that fortunately the computer was in a common area and my son wasn't allowed to touch a computer for many months. And he's a really, really good kid; it's just too easily accessible.; 5:33 AM
Ladytink_534 said...: I know how you feel. Spammers should all be shot!; 7:18 AM
nellsquirrel said...: If you need help tying the SOB's up to put under the elephant, just holler. You have 3 people waiting in the wings to aid and abett.; 7:51 AM
Anonymous said...: I don't usually sign up for much of anything on the web because I don't want to deal with spam, but I do get my share of it. I really think that my ISP is pretty good, though, since they seem to keep out most of the *yard long penis* type of spam. That being said, I agree with nellsquirrel that you have a lot of people waiting to help you tie the spammers up & deposit them beneath the elephant.; 9:51 AM
Suzanne Simmons said...: I finally had to shut down my guestbook in September 2005 because I was getting 100+ spams per day. I hated having that kind of ugliness and language on my web site, even though it was through no fault of my own.

It's a shame, but I'm not going to have a guestbook at www.ElizabethGuest.net when my new web site opens later in February.

I guess this is truly a case of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
~Suzanne; 10:02 AM
Jessica said...: And in a really scary report I saw yesterday, 94% of email sent in December 2006 was spam. And that doesn't even cover the comment spam on blogs, guestbooks, etc, that Ann was talking about.

I heard a great story a while back which will fall under the Karma category. This guy (who was a bit of a computer geek) kept getting enormous amounts of spam and was getting understandably annoyed. I'm not sure how (whether it was a newspaper article or his own research), but he figured out the name of one of the "spam kings" and discovered that this guy had just built a multi-gazillion dollar house in northern Virginia. Through public records, our friendly computer guy found the address. He signed this guy up for as many catalogs and direct mail that he could, and he posted the address on his website and invited others to do the same. Apparently the spam king was getting truckloads of catalogs and direct mail.

While I don't normally advocate revenge, I must admit this tickled my funny and karma bones. A classic case of what goes around comes around :).; 10:02 AM
Karibear said...: I hope that poor teacher wins on appeal or something. How on earth can a person be responsible for the failure of a pop-up blocker [I assume that's what happened] on a school's system? It's not like it was HER computer, after all. I'd think those busybodies would be a lot more concerned with the kids who have no idea who George Washington was. Besides, those kids who were 'exposed' to a porn site do live in the real world, don't they? Do they ever get to watch the news? Do they ever get to ride through whatever city they live in? If they live in an inner city, don't they have to walk past unspeakable things going on just to get to school? And if the kids are so sheltered that they've never been there/seen those things in real life, how are they going to survive in the real world?

I know someone who grew up sheltered like that, and she's still paying for it - she married a real jerk when she was 17 who regularly beat the crap out of her. She thought it was NORMAL, because she'd never even heard of spouse abuse! By the time she figured out that if she stayed with him she was going to die - and apparently he did tell some of their friends he was going to kill her, she left and hid out, leaving her kids behind [it was just herself that got hit, he was a good father otherwise and she felt they'd be safe with him] then eventually filed for divorce. The judge didn't believe her when she said he'd hit her - there were no police reports, no reports from the ER, nothing but a lot of people's sworn statements to back her up - and he gave custody of the children to the jerk, and gave her a crushing amount of chld support to pay. Since then, the jerk has accumulated a rather long record of beating his girlfriends, many of whom HAVE pressed charges and he's ended up in jail several times, but every time she tries to reverse the custody order, the family court judge still claims that she can't prove he did anything to her and she just wants her kids back so she won't have to pay child support. She grew up in a small town and is quite bitter about having been so sheltered from what happened in the real world that she couldn't take appropriate care of herself or her children.; 10:13 AM
Jayne Ann Krentz said...: I'm with you, Elizabeth. Finally had to shut down my guest book and every other interactive place on my website because of the spam. What a pain.

--Jayne; 11:18 AM
Karibear said...: There are several authors that I know of who either have nothing interactive on their sites or don't answer email. In fact, there's one who won't even read it, unless it's pre-screened, for very good reasons, but once it's pre-screened, if it makes it's way to her, she does comment. All comments are then posted, but there's no way to contact her directly and there's no way to find out where she lives.

I don't have the foggiest idea how an automatic forwarding thing would work, but if any of you are interested in trying something like that [you could check Mercedes Lackey's site to see how it looks], I'd be willing to try some pre-screening. It's not like I have a lot to do otherwise, and it would be nice to be helpful to people I admire and who have provided me with so much pleasure over many years.; 1:39 PM
Susan Andersen said...: Oh, yeah. And domain names are particular magnets. I've even gotten several from ME. Spammers somehow used my domaine email to mail their crap.

Jessica, I can believe that report. I have a junk filter and it easily has 200 emails in it daily. And that doesn't count the ones that slip through and end up in my main email account.

Still, thanks for the laugh, Elizabeth. Loved the illustrations. :); 1:48 PM
Lori Foster said...: Oh Elizabeth! I'm so sorry - and I'm laughing so hard! I love it when you speak your mind. ;-)

Yeah, spam sucks. Why oh why can't they regulate that the way they regulate every other flippin' thing?

Thanks for the chuckle, and really, I AM sorry. Very much so. I know your readers will be too.

HUGS,

Lori; 2:51 PM
elizabeth said...: Susan--Celeste rounded up the illustrations for me. I just told her what I wanted. She's a great lady!; 4:28 PM
Karibear said...: This post has been removed by a blog administrator.; 8:52 PM
Karibear said...: Susan:

I have a friend who has her own domain name. She does a specific craft, sells at both craft shows and online. About 3 years ago when my ISP upgraded their spam blocker programs, they blocked her domain. It took a lot of comversations by phone between her and my ISP's head tech to figure out how to let us continue our ongoing e-correspondence. They told me and her that it wasn't HER domain, it was the router it went through that was blocked. I really wish they were as efficient at blocking the Nigerian spammers, in particular. About a year ago they switched server companies and sent out messages to everyone touting the 'new, improved' etc, but when I called and asked why I was getting more spam than ever, they said there was no way to block the Nigerian spam.

Spam blockers are funny things. I have a friend in San Francisco who switched to AOL several years ago, and she sent a broadcast message to everyone in her address book [a lot of people, she does a lot of contracting and keeps in touch with the musicians she uses via email] and AOL turned her off. It took her hours on the phone to convince them that she really wasn't spamming, just sending a change of email address message - and IIRC, it took them another day to reactivate her account.; 8:58 PM
Anonymous said...: Love your blog Ann. :D Well, long ago when I figured out what causes you to get spam, I signed up for an on-line email account and use that for anything online that I need. ALL the spam goes there. I rarely even look at it other than the initial sign-up phase of whatever I was looking in to. Since most of it is auto filtered, I don't even have to bother with deleting it. The "trash" empties itself periodically.

I hate it when authors have to remove features that allow the fans to interact, but I do understand.

Love the revenge story against the Spam King. :D

KathyLynn; 6:27 PM
dee said...: what I was told to do was have one email address for home and one email address for all the things you sign up for. :); 1:06 AM
elizabeth said...: Thanks, everyone. I've got my own email under control, but my website...

Refer back to elephant photo.

So far, my readers can still ask me questions in one of the forum. That will change as soon as the spammers discover the opening.

*sigh*; 8:56 AM
Ranurgis said...: You don't even have to have a domain name in order to get e-mail from yourself: I've got hundreds of e-mails just from my own e-mail address or the corollary: e-mails from mailer-daemon or postmasters telling me that the e-mail address I've supposedly sent e-mail to does not exist, thus generating a reverse e-mail.

What someone said here is my question too: Don't people have anything else to do except make life miserable for other people? I think that Spam king got his just rewards, not revenge. After all, the saying is: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

I guess the people caught in the middle are those who may honestly believe they will be able to earn some money by actually sending out these contracted e-mails. You can see it when the sender and the message follow a particular pattern. So many have addresses at least that are in foreign countries. They may not even know what is going on.

Maybe that is why right from the start of the computer and especially the Web, astute people warned that ultimately the Internet would bring nothing but evil.

I feel bad for that very sheltered woman whom nobody will believe. I'm sure there are other cases like hers of especially women who have been brought up in sects like the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Hutterites, the Old Order Mennonites and others who live virtually secluded from the world. How can they, even the young men, be aware of all the evil and perversion that's out in our world. I'm sure few of us know everything that is being perpetrated, and often in the name of right or justice--well, let's just say that there really is very little justice in our world and leave it at that.; 4:27 PM
SuePicky said...: OMG! I'm sorry, you are completely right, spam is awful and spammers should be strung by the tiny appendages they wish to enlarge, but that was just too funny! I miss hearing you more often. Hope you don't have to jump through any more hoops to keep them at bay.; 6:47 AM
Anonymous said...: I'm ready for duty whenever you need me....

Melephant :-)
*waving to suepicky and nellsquirrel*; 8:05 AM
Anonymous said...: Waving back! It's good to see you! Sue; 11:13 AM

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Monday, January 29, 2007

ELIZABETH LOATHES SPAM

25 Comments: