Valiant fight against ‘spam’ and junk-mail offerings

The commercial e-mail, or “spam,” that clutters so many personal computer systems is fast becoming such a pain in the butt for computer users that nearly 30 states have passed or are considering legislation outlawing or severely restricting such unsolicited offerings.

Invasion-of-privacy horror stories abound about the unwanted advertising messages that promote everything from gadgets that promise to transform guys

into major babe magnets (some assembly required), to X-rated movies and hot tips on the stock market guaranteed to make you a millionaire overnight. Throw in those so-called Nigerian scam letters that seek to bilk numbhead investors out of their life savings in pursuit of a cut of millions waiting to be liberated from the Nigerian Ministry of Health and Social Services and it’s enough to make a guy think twice before turning on his computer.

Since this unsolicited junk can be sent through cyberspace for next to nothing compared to the cost of postage for a traditional mass mailing, you can well imagine that the position of the postal service on anti-spam legislation might be about the same as that of most any target of the aggravating practice. Which is to say the legislation can’t come soon enough.

Still, one man’s invasion of privacy can be viewed as another man’s denial of freedom of speech, and so the issue seems a good bet to eventually wind up in the lap of the United States Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, back in the workaday world, the snail-mail junk offerings differ only in that recipients have something tangible to muckle on to and toss into the trash. A bonus is the mental picture of postal employees fetching reams of fliers and the like from the rear loading dock and diligently stuffing the material into the post office mail boxes so patrons might retrieve the unsolicited advertising and chuck it into the lobby’s waste basket in order that postal clerks at the end of the day may haul it back to the loading dock to be trucked off to the recycling plant. Surely the late madcap inventor Rube Goldberg could have enjoyed a field day designing a machine cobbled together from baling wire, levers, pulleys, trap doors, gearboxes and a squirrel on a treadmill to make short work of the dubious exercise.

It is axiomatic that when you receive junk mail that has “Important Material. Open Immediately” stamped on the envelope in overblown letters you may rest assured that the material may be a lot of things, but important is not one of them. Depositing it, unopened, into the aforementioned dumpster can be done without fear of lost opportunity.

The trademark of a goodly amount of junk mail is its propensity to be too smart by half in pushing product – not unlike the evening television network news programs whose anchors promise a juicy “exclusive” story if viewers will but hang on until the end of the show, and, once they have viewers hooked, serve up some inconsequential dud.

Hornswoggled by Tom Brokaw yet again. Will we ever learn? (While I’m on the subject of television’s bait-and-switch tactics in its news presentations, if it seems to you that the medium’s definition of “breaking news” differs greatly from your definition of the term, do not feel like the Lone Ranger. To the cable news networks especially, rare is the news story that is not considered “breaking.” But that’s a diatribe for another day.)

A typical day’s worth of junk mail might include the never-ending solicitations from every address label-dispensing charitable organization ever conceived, pleas from book clubs and record companies to ex-members to come back home to fantastic savings, free-trial postings for patent medicines to put a zip in your step, mattress and furniture bargains to die for, easy-reply-form guaranteed life insurance coverage for the old fogy set, no questions asked. Offers you simply can’t refuse, deals of a lifetime that only a real dope would reject.

A credit card company advises that it has gone to great lengths to make “arrangements” for me to see my personal credit record, risk-free for a month, as a guard against the potential hijacking of my credit and my “personal” identity, which, I suppose, is not to be confused with my other identity. I appreciate the outfit’s concern for my credit rating, but I suspect that its real interest lies in its arrangement – buried in the fine print – for me to pay “only $99.99” for the other 11 months of the deal.

There are some offers you can refuse. You just have to know where to look for them.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.