Stating the Obvious

What is it with junk mail and spamming? They fill our mail boxes full of rubbish, they may think it is not rubbish but with the amount we receive daily it all becomes rubbish as there is so much to sort through.

Our poor letter boxes sitting outside our homes or stacked up in towers in front of an apartment blocks. These letter box droppers continually ram paper into the boxes to the extent the letter box looks like it has bitten off more than it can chew so you have dig through the mail to find your the real stuff, usually bills . Or when you see the letter box droppers walking along streets with terraces and their tiny front porches or gardens not even bothering to put the junk into the box but just to walk pass and throw it into their areas which becomes rubbish.

My letter box in the past 2 days, this would be a smaller sample than any other week as we are currently in school holidays. Two department store catalogues, 5 menus, 4 real estate pamphlets, 2 cleaning services, 1 medical centre, 1 hotel, and the local paper, approximately weighing 250gms. I am not working so I have no use for any, other than the local paper. I am one apartment in 2 blocks with over 200 mailboxes, there are also another 4 smaller blocks in the area. How much paper is that just for one area in a suburb? My suburb is high density living, we are looking at lots of letter boxes. How many trees and how much of that goes into the recycle bin?

Since I have been networking I have been able to avoid spammers. Then I started blogging. Initially it was only a few a week and I could handle it, then I added a plug-in into the site to filter the spam but it made it worse I was receiving about 20 a day. I unplugged the plug-in and the spamming slowed again but not back at the levels it was at in the beginning. This continues for a couple of weeks, there are always 2 common links and email. But then it starts getting worse. So I decide to blacklist these sites and email addresses, the ones I had received that day. As I was doing this I was hit by a bot, I had heard about bots some sort of spamming thing. Then I see email coming in, over 30 spam’s all containing more than 2 different URL’s and 1 email address, not one word made any sense, all just gibberish, all received in less than a minute.

Find another plug-in, quickly. Oh… Is that why you have to put in a code for comments? To stop bots. In the time it took me to install the plug-in I received another 15 emails. Majority of all spamming starts at 10pm Sydney time and continues through the morning but then stops and starts up again at 10pm. I had caught this bot at 11pm, imagine what I would have woken up to if I did not put the plug-in. Computer time, bandwidth, generation of email accounts, URL’s, power, time retrieving and deleting and now additional plug-ins to protect yourself from spam. What do spammers expect to achieve?

This junk that fills our letter/mail boxes must employee many people, letter box droppers, printers, marketing, designers of all sorts from graphic to web and writers. We have a businesses based on annoying people. The return must be beneficial to these companies otherwise it would not be done. But what a waste of resources and the carbon footprint left from these activities.