Rant: A Newfound Spam Irritation

I like to think that over the years of me being online, I have slowly but surely "guided" people into the ways of Anti Spam, Anti Phishing, the "forward to get" and "forward to give" mails, and especially the mails that are titled "Fw: FW: FWD:FWD:FWD:Fw: Fw: Re: This is cute - forward to all your friends / warn all your friends".

*rant rave*

To be fair, the number of these sorts of mails I get are slowly diminishing because people know I will likely give them a spank. The commercial spam - viagra, drugs, banking, whatever - you can only do so much about, but with filters and decent software, I tend to not see much spam in a day. That's not saying I don't not get it - I get hammered to smeggery by the crap, but Thunderbird catches most of it, and that spam it doesn't get, I press J and it notes the spam and remembers it.

And using Gmail of course, that has very nifty spam filters, and it's very rare I get spam in my inbox on my Gmail account. You'd do well to use Thunderbird with a Gmail account, activate POP Forwarding, and live the spam-free life.

Anyway, back to my point about Spam Irritation.

I am a bit of a Facebook fan. I play Scrabble on there, I poke people all day long, I use the mail system - generally, it's a time sink. There is "The Wall" and better, the "Super Wall" which lets people leave you messages, cards, notes - whatever. However, people have started to, how do you say, spam the shit out of it.

It's like people have lost all sense of mind, and me being me, I dutifully log in and delete them all. So, you're on my Facebook friends list, that's great, it means I am already your friend. I don't need bears, flowers, amulets, lucky charms, hugs, kisses or whatever else says "If you're my friend, send this back, send to X people for Y to happen."

• I AM your friend, hence you being on my FRIEND list!
• NOTHING will happen if you forward to 5, 50 or 500 people.
• NO charity, company or individual is tracking your message, and WON'T donate £, $ or € to anyone

I'm not including the chain letters that go around (Send or the ghost will get you!), the stuff to "see how far it can go" things (Travelling Bears, Camper Vans, Vehicles etc)...

I could sit here and piss and moan for hours about it, but I am holding back... I've had very little sleep, plus have been playing Computer Fix It Guy all weekend and have been out all afternoon doing just that... I think I need caffeine before I commit a splatter-related crime.

With a chainsaw.

I cannot recommend Thunderbird for email management, nor Gmail for a decent webmail service with POP features, neither any more highly. If you want a Gmail invite, just shout.

Huff. I think for safety sake I will find a spammer trying to contact me and see what I can do to annoy them.