Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Unsubscribe All

So I get a good bit of junk email. I guess it's because of the surveys and whatnot that I give my info to, but I don't know who exactly is passing out my email address like it's going out of style. All I know is that it seems to have increased over the past few days and I think I have a conspiracy theory as to why. It goes like this:

1) Leia signs up for something which gives some company the opportunity to sell her email address to everyone and their brother.
2) Everyone and Their Brother, Inc. (henceforth ETBI) then sends Leia more junk mail than grains of sand exist in the universe.
3) Leia's Outlook kindly filters out approximately half of these (mostly the "I am Nigeria and must to send you money" emails).
4) Leia does the honorable thing and takes the time on the others to actually unsubscribe from the email lists of both the corporation in the advertisement itself and the _different_ corporation that sent it to her.
5) Leia then _blocks_ the sender (not that that matters all that much since they use a random email generation program to create the various email addresses that the emails are "from").
6) The various companies tell Leia that they have anywhere from 48 hrs to 10 days in which they "might" send her more emails.
7) ETBI and friends then put Leia on their "Spam-a-lot" lists for the maximum duration of their grace period so that her junk mail increases exponentially, making sure that they don't repeat email addresses just in case Leia has blocked them.

I mean, I get a good bit of email normally, but of the approximately 30 emails I've gotten so far today, roughly 15 of them have been complete junk that Outlook has failed to filter out. That means ~30 different times to unsubscribe, just in case it's a different company than it was yesterday.

I don't care how much Oprah loves it, I don't need any acai berries. We don't need help with our credit. I don't care which is better, Coke or Pepsi (because I've got familial obligations to say that Coke is better) and I'm not buying any of the things you need to buy in order to get the "free" laptop anyway, so it doesn't really matter. I'm not trying any of the amazing weight loss remedies you're selling right now or at any point in the foreseeable future. And I'm _certainly_ not going to "cleanse my colon" right now.

So internet conspiracy, I'm on to you. There's nothing I can do about you, but I'm on to you.

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