Spam a lot

I last wrote about the devil that is email spam back in September, and another post from David at Palmblogging has resurrected my ire on this one.

David says that he, thankfully gets very little spam. I get a lot. Bucketfuls. On my desktop PC, I use the excellent Mailwasher Pro to filter out all the crap on my ISP servers before I download it, but on my mobile devices I can't - therefore I get all this rubbish but I do make sure the first thing I do once it's download is trash it before opening it. Inevitably though from time to time I'm too quick to click on something or click the wrong button and just opening a spam email carries risks.

I've spoken to my ISP (Pipex, now owned by the dreadful Tiscali) about spam filters, but too be honest they weren't very helpful, acknowledging there is a problem but being very wishy washy about what they can do about it (a lot more if you ask me).

So, we're currently stuck with the problem of spam. Actually spam reached it's 30 year anniversary last week at reported by the BBC at the time, so it's not a new phenomenon.

I try to be careful about where I give my email address, but these days with so many sites demanding your email address as a mandatory username for access, it's hard not to give it out - especially for someone who uses the Internet as much as I do, and with the best will in the world, you can't control what happens to your data, or who gets it once you've clicked "submit". I dread to think how many people and organisations have got information on me. And if I knew it would probably scare me stiff.

Many of my problems I think cam from an online purchase of a watch a couple of years back. At the time I was getting very little spam, although it was a menace even then.
Then, all of a sudden I started getting loads of emails offering me Rolex's and other timepieces at incredible prices, and ever since then it's spiralled out of control, with the usual subject matter of most spam (great deals on anything from watches to viagra and other more obviously explicit stuff). It's really really annoys me, and I just wish the online industry would take this seriously and do something about it.