David Emery Online

Beggars and Spam

20 June 2006

Beggars.

Nobody likes them.

And yet, if nobody gave money to them, they’d go away. It’s that simple really. Life has so many problems that could be solved so easily if people would use a bit of common sense.

Transferring to the online realm; pop-up windows, loud flash adverts and spam. No of these would exist if they weren’t affective in some small way.

Of course, the big one among those is email spam – the others being merely irritating, email spam costs business millions in lost productivity.

But if no-one clicked on any of the links, spam wouldn’t exist.

Crazy, isn’t it?

Maybe we should use automated spam filtering not to filter out spam, but to identify the people that are clicking on the links. I’m not sure what a fitting punishment would be though; maybe your email address should get blacklisted, or just taken away completely. Or maybe just posted online, so the spammers can target just them, and don’t have to bother with the rest of us…