I hate spam!
Posted by John on October 10th, 2006
I think it’s safe to assume that everybody hates spam. When I was younger I would never check the mail box, even though it was just outside our door. So I didn’t care about spam mail until I was living by myself. It started while I was doing my undergrad in UK, everyday we would receive tons of junk mail through the mail hole in our door. So whenever we went out we would see all the junk on the floor.
Of course junk took a whole new dimension when talking about e-mails. I’ve always used webmail, because I moved a lot especially during my uni years. My first e-mail was hotmail, and I would use that to sign up to lots of stupid online sites/services, so I would get hundreds of junk mail everyday. I still check this e-mail to this day, but only to remove spam mail. Gmail is much better at it, even though that is a public e-mail (the one I use for this site).
Another spam is comments on this website. This is a blog that allows people to comment on my posts. Unfortunately there are programs called bots that crawl around the web and automatically leave spam comments with links to their own website. The more links a website get, the higher its rank in search engines is, the higher hits it gets, the higher ads revenue it gets. Luckily Wordpress is pretty good at fighting this kind of spam.
Ever since I moved to Shanghai, I get a new kind of spam: text messages on cellphones. I never used to get them in Italy or UK, but now I keep getting stupid text messages telling me about the weather, or some new phone services or other things that I don’t know about. The irony is that they’re obviously all in chinese, and I can’t even read them!! So this spam is really wasted on me. Do you get this kind of spam in your country?