Spam, Spam, Lovely Spam!

Whether you like it or not, Monty Python’s Flying Circus is very likely responsible for how all that crap in your inbox is named and their Spam sketch is said to have been the precursor to what we all know as unwanted email. The sketch in question is about the canned pork product and its ubiquitous, repetitive, and unavoidable inclusion in the menu that’s on offer at the Viking café. It’s estimated that nearly 90% of all email is spam and I, like many others, can certainly vouch for that fact.

Let’s Play Whack-A-Mole!

I would estimate that I receive around 100 spam emails per day and they usually arrive in Promotions and Social in my Gmail account. When I can be bothered, because it’s a nauseating task, I select them all and bin them. I then open the BIN folder and delete them permanently only to find that within a minute or two… more spam pops up – rinse and repeat. If I had the patience, I could filter each spam email or even unsubscribe, but frankly, nuke and destroy is the fastest and possibly most satisfying (questionable) option.

However, one does need to exercise a little caution when destroying spam email because very often, legitimate email will be flagged as spam. Even Gmail has been known to flag its own Google email and a prime example of this crazy situation was last year when YouTube emailed asking me to agree to the new terms of service – an email to which I had to reply in the affirmative. Unfortunately, said email was marked as spam, I never saw it, probably deleted it, and was subsequently removed from YouTube’s Creator Programme. Fortunately, some companies advise us to check our Spam folders when signing up for a legitimate service, so it’s definitely a point worth remembering.

I only use two email programs – Gmail and Microsoft Outlook (ex Hotmail) and spam is just as bad on Outlook, when I can be bothered to check it, since Focused and Other are pretty much the same. In the end, I spend very little time tackling the Spam menace because frankly, there are far more important things to do in my life, such as motorcycling, gaming, writing, and enjoying the rollercoaster ride of life in Argentina.

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