Liora's Journal: Charting the Spamdemic

I ran across an article on Wired News today that talked about the doomsday path of spam. The article directs you to an example map that shows a company specific (but I can only guess hypothetical) path for a poor unsuspecting bloke's email address. What I suspect it does show fairly accurately is which companies are awful enough to send your address off in a list down the long dark spam-filled road to complete box-swamping.

What offenders do I recognize? Yesmail, I know some people who use that. TicketMaster! Everyone has to use TicketMaster! That sucks. Gevalia? The coffee people? That's good coffee. Flower.com? Well, I won't be using that site to send my condolences anymore. Xerox Corporation. My uncle is an engineer for Xerox. That's a big company. They do it?!?!!! Of course I've heard of Columbia House, BMG and Publisher's Clearing House. They junk your snail mail; it's not surprising they spam you too... Sylvan Learning? Isn't that where you get tutored for like the GRE or something? Darn. I would have maybe used those folks.

What I find so disturbing about this is that there are places I would probably have trusted with my email on this. I just bought a house and went through Royal Bank of Canada for my lending, but imagine if I had gone online? How many different online mortgage companies are there? Are any of them NOT on this flowchart?

I have been thinking about spam more and more as my lycos email account keeps getting more. So far there has only been one that was so unsolicited I have no idea where it came from, but I have a feeling it is the beginning of the end. Thank goodness pop3 accounts to me are largely disposable.

Canada eh?

[red5]

I just bought a house and went through Royal Bank of Canada for my lending, but imagine if I had gone online?

I didn't know they do business in the states as well?

Re:Canada eh?

[Liora]

Yes, they do. I was surprised as well, but they are pretty competitive and were able to offer the best kind of deal of any... therefore I picked them. Oh yeah, you're from Canada. I had quite forgotten.

sylvan

[gmhowell]

They do test prep for GRE, SAT, etc., but their bread and butter business is tutoring kids who are either too spastic to sit through their lessons in school, or kids whose parents aren't satisfied with the 98th percentile, and must have them in the 99th percentile.

My wife used to work there.

Re:sylvan

[Liora]

Even more reason for my not attending classes there. Your poor wife, having to work with the spastics and the spoileds.