New Fun Blog – Scott Bilas

Spam filters are pretty good these days. Gmail, Hotmail, whatever comes with Kerio, all good. So doesn’t it drive you nuts when spam comes from your friends? I don’t mean the ridiculous forwarded emails with the top ten funniest cat jokes. I mean the constant barrage of invites to new social networks and other Web 2.0 crap. “A requested your trust on B”. “C wants you to join his network on D”. If you’re lucky they’re in a language you understand. What does “Mijn uitnodiging vervalt bijna!” mean anyway? InterTran claims “My invitation maturity date nearly!” but it still sounds like spam to me.

I bet that every few weeks you hear about some new social network through invites like this. It’s virtually guaranteed to be someone you barely know uploading their entire contact list to the site through some fancy Ajaxy gadget they spent $100K developing. And the emails all get through your fancy spam filter because they’re either from your friends or from people you worked with 10 years ago. Do you keep your contact list clean of old entries? Well, the emails get through anyway! They’re invites, not spam, after all. Not a single one tries to sell you c1alis. Well, so far.

Do you find yourself wanting to sign up? Maybe to make the invites stop, because you can set some kind of auto-accept flag? Or maybe you want to sign up because you think it would be rude to refuse an invite? Maybe you’ll take the passive approach and just delete the emails as they come in. Or set up a filter to do it for you.

Remember when this used to happen in the old days? Remember when the culprit was always a computer virus? Microsoft added annoying little “are you sure” dialogs to everything to try to solve this. Ha ha! Well, now the spammers have figured out how to get people to do it on purpose. So now you spam your friends. They don’t call it viral marketing for nothing.

Please stop.

Every time I turn around there’s some new blog with a name like “Meaningless ramblings from a (insert job here)“. Ugh. Please, stop.