Before starting, I will accept that I am also guilty of spamming sometime in the past, albeit indirectly. If you have been in recruiting, you must have spammed. With clients screaming for more resumes, recruiters resort to lot of unintelligent stuff and they tend to send out a lot of unsolicited and utterly inappropriate mails.
I guess almost all of you would be getting mails from some friend to join him/her on a particular community site . I often keep ignoring such invite mails. Quite a few of us don’t mind opening up our address books to be used by these websites. Perhaps we need to exercise a little restraint before we send mails to everyone in our addressbook. If you know your friends well, you would know their interests so send them stuff of their choice, I am sure they would appreciate this.
The funniest thing which I came across recently was mails from few sites who somehow had managed to get a long list of mail ids and had been sending out mails religiously, they had put a message in the finest print at the bottom of the page “ Click here to unsubscribe”.To me , this is something which defies all logic. Can somebody tell me when did I subscribe before they sent me a mail like this .If I want to keep my inbox clean then this means extra work for me. I will have to go clicking unsubscribe on each of these mails.
Gmail does a good job filtering spam,but a lot of spamming happens under the garbs of referrals made by contacts. And there seems to be no way out how I can avoid this. My mail box gets loads of it , my scrapbook gets it and now my mobile phone is getting them too. And the problem is quite a lot of it comes from people/service provider I know. I am not sure how you can avoid getting spammed, but I can point out trigger points when you can expect some spam to flow in.
- When you have posted your resume on a job portal
- When you join a social networking site
- When you list yourself on your alumni site
- When you dropped your visiting card in some mall
- when you enquired for any kind of financial product/service
So till we have a solution or we netizens start exercising some discretion,enjoy your spam meal.
