Dear Sales…

As a group, spammers are surely some of the most despicable human beings on the face of the planet. They have no concern whatsoever for your privacy, and they’ll use virtually any trick in the book to get you to open one of their equally despicable spam email messages.

Rather than using email marketing techniques that are on the up-and-up such as developing a double opt-in mailing list or partnering with others who have already done so, they instead use robotic email address “scrapers” that crawl the web from site to site harvesting any and all email addresses they can find. Then they use a computer program to automatically send spam emails to all of those addresses at once.

The crazy thing is these idiots don’t even bother trying to match a real name up with the email addresses they harvest even though doing so would be a fairly simple matter on many if not most websites. Take mine for example…

My primary website is www.rlrouse.com, a derivative of my initials and last name. Several pages of the site contain my name so it seems to me that a little programming magic would enable the spammer to determine that my name is indeed Rick. But no, the spam emails I receive in relation to that site all start like this:

Dear Sales,

Blah blah blah…

I guess just because the primary email address used on the site begins with sales@ they naturally assume that my first name is Sales. Sorry folks, but it isn’t. And even though your despicable spams sometimes make it past my spam filter, I’ll never be fooled into believing that  a message addressed to Sales was intended for me. Apparently enough recipients are fooled into purchasing from these scumbags that it remains a lucrative (if disgusting) means of making a living, but as long as I live (or at least until I change my name to Sales), they’ll never make a single dime from me.