Spam! Delete it
Posted on May 17th, 2008 by sherrilynne
I’ve just spent an hour deleting about 8,000 spams from my inbox. Yes, I know I should tidy it up more often, but I really don’t mind saving it and dealing with it all at once. I just ignore spam until I have the time to deal with it, and then I hit the ‘del’ button.
I don’t freak out about spam! No hissy fits. I don’t publish blacklists. I’ve never set up a wiki to expose spammers. I couldn’t be bothered writing blog posts to ‘out’ the nastiest of spammers or make it my business to educate spammers about how to target me better.
I just hit del. More people should try it. It’s quite liberating.
Filed under: public relations
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Yikes, that much spam should never reach your inbox! How long did that take to accumulate?
A well configured mailserver (running SpamAssassin, Amavis, Razor & Pyzor with conservative use of spam blacklists like the Spamhaus SBL) should result in no more than one or two spam messages in your inbox per day, with the rest auto-filed in the junk folder ready to be checked for false-positives. Any more and it’s worth looking for an alternative solution. I suppose with PR it may be a little trickier to filter as certain words may be similar to spam, but once the mailserver’s bayesian filters are trained up it should be fine.
I tend to recommend Google Apps for Domains, which provides GMail and their awesome spam filtering using your domain name, but if you don’t want to switch mail providers a third-party MX filtering service like Postini (now owned by Google) or MessageLabs is worth looking at:
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/compare.html
http://www.messagelabs.co.uk/products/email/anti_spam.aspx
(You’ll need to reconfigure your DNS MX records so all your mail passes through them first.)
I’m not terribly worried about teaching anyone — spammer or flack — how to target ME better. I wrote that post to drive home the point that it is not that hard to find out what a blogger, even a business blogger, cares about. Pretty much everything on that list was discoverable reading my blog, and most of it is in the About page.
If PR people want bloggers to read their email, instead of pressing delete, they’d be wise to pay some attention to the people, not just the blog.
Market forces will prevail. If bad pitchers continue to get ignored, they’ll either wise up, or push off.
Well, I can understand that many, even most, PR practitioners did not (and do not) bother, in your words, to “(write) blog posts to ‘out’ the nastiest of spammers or make it my business to educate spammers about how to target me better.”
As I wrote, “Most of us would likely have just filtered the emails and moved on with our lives.” That’s what I do.
Of course, I didn’t write to out anyone and, as an educator, um - that’s what I do - educate.
I believe I get your point, Sherrilynne. But, how nice would it be if practitioners did seek to educate. :o) What a concept.
Upon reflection I think it’s important to make the distinction between bad pitchers and spammers, for my argument to hold true. People will always send ‘off the mark’ pitches for one reason or another. Spammers though, get your email address, add you to the distribution list and blast out anything and everything. My rant is about spammers. Susan and Robert are trying to help those for whom there might be some hope.