Unwanted Contact from Known/Unknown Sites and Spam Mail.
Unasked for contact from other people or organisations on the Web appears to be on the increase and becoming a larger problem day by day.
This is undoubtedly a controversial issue, but we see it as a serious problem and just wonder if any readers have any ideas on how it might be stopped ? The stopping of it, if it was ever achieved would be quite a monumental task, but we feel that if some measures are not taken soon, the Web will eventually become a place where no honest, sincere or innocent people will be able to venture !!
It is quite possible that many Web users have not yet realised the seriousness of the problem, as the tentacles of these intruders upon our lives may not yet have reached them ??
Our experiences have already reached unacceptable proportions, but all we did was set up a web site, and join one or two organisations on the Web that interested us, either for their community/people communication aspects, or others which appeared to be interesting sites for various reasons. We also made one or two purchases on the Web, either for Software or made small payments to certain sites for membership fees.
It is obvious that some information had to be given to these organisations in order for them to contact us, mostly just an email address, and in all other cases where too much information was asked, we either refused or gave fictitious information in order to protect our privacy as much as possible. However, some time later we started to receive unwanted email in ever growing volumes from a variety of sources usually offering 'Get rich quick' opportunities, which of course we refused. One thing we discovered after repeated attempts, was that the senders of these spurious offers were not contactable by replying to the email address from where the offer was made, as the mail was returned "Address Unknown" !!
This usually means that the sender is using some forwarding agency so that he or they can remain anonymous, which in itself is extremely suspicious.
To avail of the offer one either had to telephone someone in a far away Country, usually America, or send a fax, or visit a Web site, but most often it was a case of sending some money, on the strength of the arguments expressed in the original email. !!
If any questions were asked, quite naturally no answers were received (these Get Rich organisations do not like questions) !! However the point should be made here that our email address had been obtained from someone who was obviously collecting addresses and selling them on for profit. !! Undoubtedly some readers will be saying "but this happens in life anyway, all the time", by ordinary post, but the difference here is that unwanted and unsolicited mail can be thrown away in the waste bin without too much trouble, but when your email box is clogged up with unwanted mail it is a totally different matter, and less easy to get rid off. Some readers will be aware, others may not, that just deleting unwanted mail from your Email folders does not rid the system of them at all. They are still in your system as deleted items, and this folder quickly grows to very large proportions.
This is also not the main part of our argument. Our argument is that a growing number of organisations are collecting and selling addresses which is leading to much larger volumes of unwanted mail, and is something to be totally condemmed.
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