Spam, spam and, er less spam thanks

It is more than 10 years since I had any trouble with SPAM - or Unsolicited Commercial Email. But I appear to have just invited something very similar back and it is a part of the modern social networking phenomenon.

Back then I worked for one of the companies unwittingly and virtually powerlessly propagating UCE; the American leader and owner then of PIPEX - UUNET. They operated the vast majority of the internet structure and it was inevitable that the spammers used their servers and client ISPs as vectors for their pernicious trade. And hopped from site to site, server to server to beat the SPAM hunters.
There are those out there who will recall the struggle a certain PR man had in deflecting their criticisms that 'you aren't doing enough'. It was easy to say we were but pretty hard to convince when the next raft of spam hit the inboxes with UUNET addresses littered through it!

Today my box is so free that Kaspersky has taken to suspecting entirely reasonable mailers simply on the basis of their success. But I have just changed all that for the worse and I am wondering whether I like it.

When YouTube and Facebook arrived I toddled off and registered and dabbled like I always have. Blogging arrived and again I dipped in a toe but got lazy and my retired lifestyle oddly means I only go on line an hour or so a day. I am back at blogging as it gets things off my chest without worrying that anyone is forced to read it - letters to editors are at least read by the editor and a sub, poor things.

Twitter seemed no more than a goldfish bowl in which the famous, the wannabes and the voyeurs could splash about harmlessly. A sort of Hello magazine without the tedium of having to talk your way into the columns.

But then I started to notice how now everyone doesn't just 'do' something on line. They are immediately exhorted to do it again and again. Tweet to your friends, put it on Facebook, make a video and stream it on YouTube, blog it and so on. In effect it seemed to me that someone had found a way for us victims to start generating our own SPAM! But it is worse even than that.

For I found some bloggers I enjoy reading and so I 'follow' them. And now my inbox is full of the blatherings of other bloggers I don't follow, usually singing the praise but sometime crudely hostile to the blogger I do want to read. I can filter it but it still sails the fibre sea.

What have we done? When I was an internet professional I received up to 400 targeted emails every day. It was often a nightmare; after all, some were really important to me. But if I were in that job today I'd be tweeting and bleating everything to make sure my audience got the message. And they would bleat and tweet back! The pipes would be pumped up with the crud like they were in the bad old days of real UCE. But we can't complain this time - Spam it might often be but unsolicited? Oh no, we've signed up for it!