09 Mar 2008 01:04:11 | Grant Pasay
Ever have a mosquito in your bedroom at night? Oh, man. There
you are, nice and happy, about to fall asleep when, zzzzzzz,
there's this irritating buzzing in your ear. You whack at the
source. The zzzzzzz stops. You got it. Good.
But wait a few minutes and, zzzzzzz, there it is again. You take
another swipe, then another. Maybe you even jump out of bed and
flick on the lights. But you can't find that crazy mosquito. Or
maybe you do find it, and gladly squish it.
Then you go back to bed and are almost asleep when, zzzzzzz.
Yes, another mosquito. Who invited these things to the party?
Didn't you put screens on the windows to stop this very thing?
Can't the mayor do something about it?
That's what SPAM is like.
SPAM is when someone sends one email to a whole bunch of people
who were minding their own business and didn't ask to receive
the email. Suddenly it appears in your Inbox, uninvited and
rather annoying.
So how do you stop it? Simple, delete the email. But then you
get another one from the same spammer. You might try to tell
them to take you off their list. And they might actually take
you off their list (or not). You might try to block their emails
so you just don't get them in your Inbox. But even if that
works, another spammer will find your email address somehow and
start sending you other SPAM emails.
Tired of all the unsolicited emails, you might get serious and
get anti-spam software (it might even come with your anti-virus
software). And that might stop most of the SPAM. But why can't
SPAM be stopped all together?
Well, the mayor might not be able to do anything about stopping
SPAM, but the US Government is taking it seriously. In 2004,
their CAN-SPAM Act became law, dealing with email "whose primary
purpose is advertising or promoting a commercial product or
service, including content on a Web site." --quoted from
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.htm
And that's why SPAM is like a mosquito in your bedroom at night.
Copyright (c) Grant Pasay 2005. All rights reserved. You may
forward this article in its entirety to anyone you wish.
About Author :
Grant Pasay is a writer, musician, moviemaker, and author of the
new eBook, "The Internet Is Like A Refrigerator: And Other Weird
Comparisons That Make it Easy to Understand Everything From AOL
to Zip Files."
