Sunday, October 14, 2012

I Hate Spammers


I probably would be one of the biggest victims of spams, considering that  I win multimillion dollars  euros and rupees every week, some dying nigerian prince wants to share his wealth with me for some reason (considering the amount of such mails I receive I believe life expectancy for Nigerian princes is very low and every Nigerian is a wealthy prince), everyday at least one girl promises to be the best life partner I could ever have, some mails have even started selling me child insurance (probably hoping that I would have by now fallen for one of those marry me spams), often RBI or Income Tax department expects me to share my account details with them, which they already have easy access to. Sometimes I receive mails with suspicious attachments, which I have never had the courage to open. Every week I receive multiple tips about earning quick money from home and almost daily I receive multiple e-mails about some walk-in for some opening in some call center offering me 10 times lower salary than what I already earn. All these are mails delivered to my inbox. Now imagine what I would find if I ever check my spam folder which receives at least 10 times more mails than the inbox. 

However recently I have noticed that I do not receive any such mails on a Sunday. That made me wonder that these spammers have become organized and have started taking weekly offs. Since I started the thought process, I continued and decided to trace the roots of spams. According to wikipedia "Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, especially advertising, indiscriminately." I think that spams go much beyond the invention of electronic-mails. 

I belong to a generation that probably still remembers that post offices were not exclusively intended to be used for sending government or corporate communications. I have used inland letters and postcards during my early hostel days to communicate with my parents and I remember receiving postcards with some story written in it and asking me to send 10-100 such postcards to random addresses if I do not want to be cursed or if I want to be blessed. Much similar to a picture of some god on facebook asking you to share the picture if you want the blessings. Now writing a postcard and posting takes much effort than clicking share button on facebook yet just the fact that I myself have received some such postcards means that some people then used to put that effort. The number could have been much higher it the postcards said "Alcohol god will drink all your stock for a dry day if you do not share this with 25 people" or "the hot girl in your college will fall for you if you send this to 10 people" (much like deodorant commercials) etc.

Nowadays with social media becoming so prominent we are seeing multiple people becoming spammers without even realising it. Otherwise how do you classify multiple people sharing posts with titles like "Share and see what happens" (this I think is the most stupid of them all), "if you love you mother, share this post" (now how much I love my family is decided basis the amount of spamming I do), "Share, if you love Jesus" (if I do not share an stupid post on facebook, somehow that makes me an atheist). Most prominent of them all are by these pseudo patriots who believe that clicking like on a facebook post with change the country and make it corruption free. These guys more often share posts with content, which they were too lazy to verify. The height of this stupidity reached its peak when some prominent people in our national politics thought that they can make APJ Abdul Kalam the president of the country again without him even contesting for the post. 

In short. I hate spammers. Except for the ones who are too stupid to make me laugh.