I can tell when a holiday is near based on the volume of spam email in my inbox. I receive twenty or so spam emails per day throughout most of the year: this is the curse of having a 20+ year old email address. But when the taps open wide in holiday season.
I feel it in my bones
Email spam trends are a bit like being an old man with arthritis, which is also an accurate description of me. “Oh, my knee is aching something fierce: must be a storm a’comin” is replaced by “Look at that: 59 new emails since midnight- Black Friday must be around the corner.”
I suppose I could get rid of the spam just by changing my email address and doing things like using a fake email address when I purchase items or sign up for services. But I like my old email address: I’ve had it since 1995 or thereabouts, and it has the comfortable feel of an old pair of slippers. And using my own actual email in registrations is also a way of avoiding problems with things like two factor authentication or password resets, rare as those may be.
Spam filtering
I’ve used various spam filters at certain points that automatically shunt unwanted email into a separate folder. But I’ve found such things to be finicky, and more often than not I still feel compelled to scan through all the junk to make sure nothing ‘important’ has been misplaced.
MacOS mail has a fairly reliable ‘junk’ filter that moves the most egregious / dangerous spam into a separate folder. I like that focus on the nasty stuff, and I’ve gotten into the habit of simply doing a quick Shift-click-delete of the mere “marketing” spam that still arrives in my inbox as part of my morning rituals. But seeing it double and re-double during the “most wonderful time of the year” can be a bit shocking, if not outright tiresome.
Ebb and tide
In a strange way I sometimes find the seasonal flood of spam email to be somewhat comforting or re-assuring. It reminds me that the world is still out there, acting normally, trying to sell me stuff I don’t need or want. The increase from twenty or so spam emails in a day to one hundred and beyond in that same span is like a slow pulse of seasonal life.
There is also something at least a little bit satisfying about selecting thirty or forty emails at once and deleting them. A small bit of virtual revenge, I suppose, showing my disdain for the marketer’s art. Take that, toxic capitalist consumerism!
It is at least a little amazing to me, though, that there are enough words in the world to write all those emails. Logically I realize that there are no real limits placed on verbiage, but I still sometimes imagine that there must be some kind of mine or factory where all the spam mail words are created. And one day, one last shovel-full will be scooped into my inbox and that will be the end.
Of course that day never comes. I suspect that advertisements for “Great deals on your favourite shoes!” will still be arriving in my unread inbox decades after I’m dead and buried. It is my small grasp at immortality, I guess.
I find it a little odd that anyone has just one email address although I suppose it is the norm. I have maybe a dozen that I use regularly and several more that I made for a specific purpose that they still serve. All the others I’ve made over the years lie fallow somewhere, forgotten by me and quite possibly no longer functional.
Even with all of these identities, spam is something I rarely see, mostly because hardly any spam makes it to my inboxes and I very rarely look in any of the spam folders, only if I’m expecting a specific email and it doesn’t arrive. I probably should check more often because today just happens to have been one of the rare ocasions I did check a spam folder and three of the four emails in it weren’t spam at all.
That does mean that there was only a single spam email in there, of course, and actually I’m pretty sure that was a genuine email as well, just not one I was interested in. So I guess i didn’t actually have any spam at all… is that weird?
I actually have several email accounts, but I view all of them in a ‘merged’ inbox in my mail app. I don’t really know the exact reasons why I receive so much spam or whether it is ‘common’ to do so.
I believe most of my spam mail originates with companies I bought things from, news sites I’ve registered on, and legitimate companies that have re-sold their mailing lists. On that basis it isn’t technically ‘unsolicited’, but it isn’t advertising stuff that I’m actually interested in.
It’s not just email this time of year. May of my RSS feeds from commercial websites are full of affiliate links to all sorts of “bargains” and “best of” lists. I try filters as best I can. The only stuff I like to buy on Black Friday is software, as there are generally good bargains on stuff I’d normally pay full price for.