On Being Spam

Scanning my emails today, I found that I won a Shell gift card, Le Creuset cookware, a 170-piece Stanley tool set and a reward from Southwest Airlines.  Of course these were in my spam folder and none of them actually came from the firms telling me what I won.  But I did get lots of offers to buy things.  Clearly, I must also be very sexy - or at least in need of lots of different products in that department - and someone purporting to be CVS is really trying to get me to respond.  They sent ten separate emails.

Forewarned about spam, I deleted all these messages without opening them, thus saving myself lots of time and probably lots of scams and efforts to co-opt my computer and identity.  I am a fan of email spam filters.  I just wish they worked even better, because I keep getting email from these same (mostly fake) senders, no doubt as they’ve learned to work around spam filtering software. 

Yet every once in a while, a glance at my spam folder shows an email actually from the person it says. This leads me to wonder why these are blocked and what else I may not be getting that I would actually want to read.  Since I do a mass-delete, these messages never reach me. After all, who’s got the time to read the name of the sender, check her/his email address and look at the subject line for 150+ of these things each day?

This has led me to a rather depressing conclusion.  What if someone thinks I’m spam? Just this past week, I emailed an organization about offering them free access to some of my work, work I usually do for a fee. I never got an answer.  I also sent an email to try to schedule a horse-riding lesson for my eight-year-old grandson who will be visiting in April. I never heard back from that firm either.  Then there’s the email I sent to get information from the chair of a university committee so that I could more accurately reflect its work in something I’m writing.  Again, I was probably just spam to all of them.

Of course the solution is to call these people directly to tell them I’m sending an email, but that’s a solution only in theory.  Since they don’t list their phone number because they don’t want to hear from people they don’t know, I can’t call them.  Even  in the few cases where I can get a general call line number, I have to wade through the “firewall” of menu prompts in order to leave a voice mail, which also never gets answered – demonstrating that I am spam in two modalities.

The dictionary defines spam as “irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the internet to a large number of recipients.” Yet I don’t think my messages are irrelevant or inappropriate, and I’m only sending them to one person.  But they, or more accurately their spam software, don’t know that.  How could they?

So sometimes I resort to sending actual letters to people I want to reach, when emails and phone calls never get through.  I usually strike out then too.  Many of these people don’t open their own mail.  They have what I’ll label “snail mail spam spotters” who toss out whatever comes from someone the receiver doesn’t know.  Increasingly, with the use of artificial intelligence, these letters won’t even be rejected by a person.  An algorithm will toss me out, making my rejection a technological trifecta: email, phone, and snail mail.  I know I’m not supposed to take this personally, since no live person is rejecting me.  But I’m human even if their spam systems are not.

I have to admit, of course, that maybe what I write just isn’t worth their time. But the more likely case (since they can’t know it’s not worth their time if they never see the contents) is what I’ll call the “high school clique” theory of modern communication.  In high school, certain people hang around with certain other people – and if you’re not a member of that inner group, you can never break in. You’re ignored at best or looked at disdainfully at worst.  So, quite clearly, I’m not part of many “in” crowds.

I could get pretty depressed if I took any of this to heart.  But I don’t (most of the time).  I console myself that the real spam, that mixture of cooked pork, salt, water, potato starch and sugar is eaten in 41 countries, including being quite popular in Asia.  Last year, according to its maker, Hormel, seven billion cans of Spam were sold, almost enough for every person on the planet.  It’s considered a delicacy by devotees and has been on palettes since World War II.  Indeed, in some Hawaiian McDonald’s restaurants you can even order spam with eggs and rice.

So, for all those who reject me as spam, you just don’t know what you’re missing. 

Photo Credit: geralt@pixabay.com