Patty decided to clean out our spam cache today. There were over a thousand items in it.
This included a staggering number of sexual enhancement ads. I will not quote them here. Insta-Hard. Rock-Hard. Secrets of Secret African Penis Cult. A more pathetic assemblage cannot be imagined.
I wonder what some archaeologist will think if, a couple thousand years from now, he discovers and reads our spam cache. “Were these people really that obsessed with the size of various body parts? No wonder their civilization collapsed.” I mean, what must we look like to a stranger, if the spam cache is the only thing he sees? What if that’s all that’s left of us? That, and assorted get-rich-quick schemes that wouldn’t fool a puppy.
Are there really that many people out there all lathered up to buy these products? Is the male half of our population really and truly that badly lost? (For some reason, or maybe no reason, they haven’t been sending us products pitched to females. Go figure.)
I pity our posterity. And I pray they’ll do better than we have so far.
I know; that garbage comes to my spam too. I try to concentrate on positive things as much as I can. It is not easy when every piece of trash is being thrown at you.
I have a song suggestion: Carroll Roberson singing Is There A Mountain? Whenever or if you would like to post it.
First thing tomorrow.
Speaking of mountains, I only just finished writing a chapter in my new Bell Mountain book when we got hit with a brief but really smashing thunderstorm.
I get mostly appeals for political contributions.
We get plenty of those–schnorrers who invoke the name of Donald Trump but never lifted a finger to help him when he needed them.
We got hit with the same thing a little earlier today. Scared the dogs, goats and almost everybody. It’s gone now and is partly sunny. We really desperately need rain in this area. This is the dryest season we have had here since 2015.
These spammers tend to be from impoverished countries and are basically people with a tiny amount of computer knowledge, and even less understanding of the peoples that they are targeting. You’d be amazed by how much spam there is. I used to manage a spam filter, and it was unbelievable how many pieces of junk email were blocked. Users would complain about one or two spams getting through, blithely unaware that literally thousands of spams were being blocked, at the same time.
Delete them, don’t open them and NEVER click on a link in any email, unless you absolutely know that it came from where it claims to come from. One for of spam is the phishing attack, which involves an email masquerading to be from a bank, or some other business, and with a link to lure you to a site that looks just like your bank’s site.
Always go to your bank, or other business by going to the site directly from your browser. NEVER click a link in an email,even if it looks legitimate.
Good advice–but I sincerely hope nobody here needs it.
Everyone here needs it; phishing attacks are common. I just hope that everyone here applies it. It’s very easy to be fooled.
Thanks for the warning.
A couple of hosers here in NJ were punished recently for making 45 million (!) robo-calls. The fine was over $1 million, plus they were put out of business.
I’d like to see such criminals held truly responsible for the harm they cause.
Let me elaborate: I am on call and have been on call 24 x 7 x 365. When my phone rings, I have to answer it. My office phone number is forwarded to my mobile phone, and again, this is 24 x 7 x 365, and has been for over two years. I instruct everyone to call my office number if they needed to contact me. Calls that go to my office number show up on my phone as originating from my employer’s main number, and once again, this is by design. My mobile phone only rings if it recognizes the originating number, because if I did do that, I get continuous robo calls.
So, when I first started with my employer, I began to receive calls on my office phone by unscrupulous callers, calling on behalf of International Data Group (IDG) which was at one time a respected technical publisher. Respected or not, they have started to employ some very unethical techniques, including numerous calls asking me to subscribe to CIO, a magazine in which I have zero interest. I told them no, and firmly instructed them never to call me again, which is my right under law.
Keeping in mind that I have to answer my phone and that calls coming to my office number (and forwarded to my mobile phone) could possibly be notification of a failure which needs immediate attention, imagine how I felt when my phone rang, just as I approached a busy intersection, and distracted me to the point that it nearly caused an accident … and it was IDG, bothering me yet again.
Criminal laws are obviously not adequate to deter these sorts of calls, but civil liability might just do the trick. Imagine some company’s name being drug through the mud because phone solicitors acting on their behalf caused an accident, possibly with physical harm or death to innocent people. Ultimately, the beneficiaries of such illegal solicitation need to be held responsible, period!
“Hi! This is Sarah from the Dept. of Medicare…”
You get the same damn call over and over again throughout the day.
You really have to be careful who you give your email address to and not post it on some website. Bots look for email addresses and once they have it they pass it on to others who pass it on to others and before you know it you have hundreds of spam emails. The only way to fix it is just a get new email and start over.