Spam makes people crazy.

I don’t like spam anymore than anyone else, but you really get an idea of how angry, frustrated and just plain childish people are by their irrational reactions to getting something they “did not sign up for”. The absolute viciousness in how people respond is, in my opinion, completely unwarranted. When I see some of the responses to my company email “newsletter”, from a verified email address, I imagine these same childish, reactive idiots jumping up and down on a grocery store flyer they’ve received in their physical snail mail box, screaming obscenities – which, by the way is completely unsolicited.

I can understand getting angry for getting consistent emails from some porn bozos (almost non-existent these days), viagra or get-rich-quick schemes, but when someone who, for one reason or another, filled out a form and checked an opt-in box, then has a case of short-term memory when they recieve a single email blast in six months, well, there is just no rationalizing that kind of behavior. I can only speculate that they think they’ve been truly violated on some level, which is not the case. You cannot apologize or bother wasting time to explain to these hot-heads that they did indeed enter their information at one time or another and check the opt-in box at the bottom of that form or I would not have their email address.

People send back one-shot emails with all sorts of knee-jerk comments from “stop sending me junk!” to “I’ll make sure to tell all my friends never to use your product”. I particularly love the latter – considering that this sociopaths’ little circle of friends would not even be close to bringing down a corporation. These responses tend to escalate to literal death threats, if you can fathom that. If this same person threatened to kill the sender of a snail-mail flyer, they’d be getting up to 5 years imprisonment for threatening the life of a fellow human being.

In the end, there are few people that actually take the time to respond, given that there are spam-filters and black-lists that the more tech-savvy of us utilize to keep unwanted email to a minimum. I don’t mind getting unsolicited email in my box – as long as it’s not repetitious overkill – and do not consider an email that proposes something I can actually use or find interesting to be spam, but these nit-wits with short-term memories really need to think before responding by banging their rattle on the bars of their crib, before firing off some of the angry and unnecessary comments I see.

Look jackass, just scroll to the bottom, “unsubscribe” to the mailing list and shut the fuck up.

’nuff said.