Every Spam Makes Me See Red

Spam is an insidious and evil marketing tool, a mindless swarm of locusts set loose upon the electronic world to plague every letter combination imaginable within the vicinity of our e-mail addresses. At one point a few years ago, before getting DSL and switching my service provider, I'd come home every night to over 100 new e-mails. My heart would swell with potential popularity, only to see that two were funny links I'd sent home to myself from work, and 98 promised me everything from “Larger Breasts to Make Him Notice” to “ViG@ra to keep Her--and You Know What--Up All Night”. I have no idea what demographic probability computer had concluded that I was an elderly transvestite, but my old inbox painted a clear and disturbing picture of who they thought I was.

We have spam protection at my job, though it's shocking to see some of the things that slip through. Spam comes in many forms, too. There was a nice older woman who'd been with our company for years, who was laid off a few years ago. Since her involuntary retirement, she's spent most of her free time e-mailing links, poems, funny pictures and just about anything else most of us put in blogs to everyone she knew in the company. I remember the first year I was with the company, while I was home recovering from surgery, she'd often send me snacks from the vending machine and other thoughtful care packages. I appreciated it then, and I often wonder how the same woman now sends 50-60 e-mails a day to a large distribution list, most with decidedly not-work-safe content. Though I have her address listed in a rule to automatically move it to the trash, if she blind copies me on something it still comes through to my inbox. I'm thinking of turning off the preview feature so I don't accidentally see some of the images she sends. There was one of a guy stuck in a shower door last week that still has me cringing; I’ll leave that to your imagination. She really needs a blog as an outlet for all the things she forwards.

While my spam system and rules miss things like my friend's inappropriate transmissions, they do catch the majority of unwanted mail. There's one spammer that I occasionally glimpse in my deleted items, that I've never been sure about. Is he selling a pyramid scheme, or financial advice? Perhaps he's a self-help guru. He always addresses me as “friend” and tells me the answers lie inside, but if I'm stubborn about the advice my real friends give me, then I'm less inclined to read a stranger's suggestions. Yet, when I saw the subject line of “HELP ME FIGHT KATRINA”, curiosity got the better of me.

Spam doesn't take a holiday in the face of tragedy. I've seen bloggers who made it through the hurricane proclaim their survival only to be greeted immediately but automatically generated ads. So I had to see how Joe Vitale would use the hurricane to sell me this book. I won't share the whole message I received, but the gist of it was that we're all victims of various things, from gas prices to weather to our “poorly run government”. He then went on to explain how positive thinking was the way forward:

”While you may not want to stand in the path
of Rita, you don't have to cower under the bed.

As odd as it may sound, I believe that if enough
of us think positive, we can create a counter
storm of sorts. We can protect ourselves and
our loved ones with our thoughts.

I've described and proved this with the research
in the back of my book, "The Attractor Factor."
Nineteen studies *proved* that when a large
group of people hold positive intentions,
those intentions radiate out and become reality.”

That's eye-opening, isn't it? Some people have blamed various levels of government for the crisis, while others have wondered why God allows tragedy in the world. The problem though, isn't weak levees, or even basic geography and common sense. Where the people of New Orleans went wrong, was in their negative thinking. Everyone thought the place would flood and it did. If they only worked together to achieve a ”Unimind” of sorts, their psychic energies could have held back the raging waters. “Joe” goes on to share more pearls of wisdom, like “If you think the storm will get you, then
it's already gotten you.” and “...pretend you are the eye of the
hurricane.”

Ugh.

The scary thing is that some people might not delete things like this, might even take it seriously. Conventional advertising is grounded in numbers. A television show stays on the air if enough people watch it, because to the sponsors those ratings equal potential customers. And as long as a product sells, a company has the budget to continue promoting it. Spam is a blindfolded creature hurtling electronic darts into cyberspace. It's free, so if only a few stick to something, it's done it's job. The e-mail I received today certainly got through. I'm positively seeing red over it. Well done spammer, well done.