Tuesday, December 27, 2005
I just read the most ridiculous statement since last year's tax return.
The Federal Trade Commission said that the incidence of spam has decreased in the two years since the passage of the CAN-SPAM Act...
(Sounds of me falling out of my chair and rolling around the floor, gasping for breath from laughing too hard...)
Yeah, right. In the past two years I went from maybe a dozen a day to over 1200 a day. Yup, you heard right. I get over 1200 spams a day. That's the price you pay for running a dozen web sites as a hobby and for a few bucks extra income.
Now, while I filter out quite a few, simply by keying off of non-existent user names that these idiots send to hoping that someone actually exists with that name, I still get tons at my legitimate addresses. Many of these I have to manually delete as it might be one from a customer that just happened to contain a trigger that sent it to my spam box.
Now, believe it or not, MY filters have only dumped two e-mails in the last six months into the spam box that weren't spam. In fact, they were both e-mails from a humor list I subscribe to.
My ISP, however...
Northstate.net aka the local Phone Company recently 'upgraded' their e-mail to a less efficient, slower, more error-prone system so they can increase my online storage from 10Mb to 25Mb. The problem is, my storage seldom exceeds 1Mb as my mail server pings my ISP account every two minutes and downloads everything it finds...
...except that which my ISP has deemed 'spam' and they dump it into it's spam box.
So, several times a day, I go online and look at that spam box, looking for the several e-mails that weren't spam but actual orders from customers. On a spam page that only displays 50 messages at a time... And takes from two to five minutes to refresh each time... While I'm sitting on top of five T-1 connections...
Already, I have had several customers ask for refunds because they didn't get their 'instant download' of a product because their order didn't make it past Northstate.net's insane filters. Filters, which I, the PAYING CUSTOMER can't turn off.
Yes, the filters are good for average Joe User, but at least give me some control over them. My customer orders are auto-generated when they buy, and have specific code embedded in the e-mail. Code which I use to filter and generate the response telling the user their unique, created on the fly, download page.
Yes, the Can-Spam act means just that: Spammers Can Spam you out of business.
Thanks a lot, FTC.
And thanks a lot to the idiots who send me ten copies of the same message sixteen times a day. It makes me want to take severe action against them.
Ok, I'm done ranting for now, so I will leave you with a happy thought:
Whenever things look bad and bleak, always remember there is someone out there who is so bad off they would actually be greatful to have the job that you think sucks...
