I had an email address for many years, kwleslie@hotmail.com. It was a useful address, since K.W. Leslie is my name, and kwleslie tends to be my screen name. Unless one of the other K.W. Leslies gets ahold of it first. Oh yes, there are others. There are also a few other Kent Leslies out there; very few people are going to have a name all to themselves unless they have a really unique name, like my cousin Smegma Leslie, who doesn’t exist anyway.
I had to ditch the address because I was slowly but certainly getting buried under a mountain of spam. There were so many people that were willing to refinance my mortgage, sell me Viagra, make my penis bigger, getting me on the ground floor (or at least the 10th floor) of their multi-level marketing scheme, and any number of unsolicited sales. The longer I had the email address, the larger the mountain grew. Eventually I was getting at least 90 spams a day.
This was in the early days of spam filtration, and pretty much the only way to do it was to create a filter for everything that you did or didn’t want in your inbox. Hotmail, at the time, had a limit—I think it was 250—on the number of filters you could create. I ran out of filters pretty fast. I tried making them more generic, blocking entire domain names, but spammers eventually learned to switch around their domain names too, and I just became tired of it.
So I abandoned my address and switched to iWon. They offer prizes for using their site; they have some sweepstakes where you could win a few thousand bucks, maybe even a million. I never won anything from them, but I figured a 0.00000002 percent chance was better than no chance at all. But slowly the spam began to pile up, and it was time to switch again. I bounced to Juno, then back to Hotmail, then back to iWon, and now I’m at Gmail. To date, my Gmail spam consisted of four messages a day in Chinese, which I can’t read. But ever since I stuck my résumé on Monster.com, it’s been filling up with crap.
By the way, Monster.com has thus far turned out to be junk. They have yet to find me a job, but they have managed to put me on at least 20 different spam accounts, and I’ve been contacted by a bunch of other employment websites who want me to put my résumé on their site, presumably to get me a job, but really because they—like Monster.com—wants to be able to say, “We have 10,000 résumés listed!” Of course they do. They’re not getting anyone any jobs. That’s why these sites have 10,000 résumés and only five testimonials. They’re a bunch of résumé graveyards—and shouldn’t the spammers realize that if we’re looking for jobs, we can’t bloody afford to have our penises enlarged?
It’s probably an exercise in futility, but I’ve been hitting all the “unsubscribe” buttons in the spam I’ve thus far received. Those that don’t have them get an email from me that reads, “Stop sending me spam.” It would be great if I could do this automatically; I’ll drop a note to Google about it. Meanwhile I have to keep shoveling out the spam.