Zen and the Art of Forwarding SPAM

 SPAM no matter how meaningful the pictures of dead soldiers or little puppies may be to you, the emails containing them are spam. 

To me the fact that they are meaningful and touching is the point.

If you received an email that simply said  "please pass this blank page along to everyone on your mailing list so that we can gather the emails addys of everyone in your address book, and the address book before yours, and the address book before that on and on..in order for us to add your name to the list of a guy who sells fake rolexes in Taiwan or penis enlargement cream soda in Germany and who in turn pay us money for the email addresses"  then maybe you wouldn't forward it. What say you? You don't care because you're using the computer at your job? Oh , I see. That's why you're stupid..

Forwarding what you think to be a legitimate money making proposition from Ukraine, the pictures of rainbows and unicorns and butterflies and angels, the easily disproved "proof" that President Obama was born in China, and various and sundry other important things you think your friends and relatives just have to know about is stupid. 


This also means you family member/friend/friend of a friend/coworker/mostly everybody: Being willfully ignorant of truthiness or woefully unaware of sites like Snopes.com is no excuse to forward me propaganda.

See something cute or funny in an email? Cut and paste the picture or the text only and send it to your friends, in a new email. Although, sometimes jpegs and gifs can have viruses embedded in them. Oh well.

Want to not be so annoyingly stupid? Go ahead, think about it. Yeah? 

Then specifically ask your recipients NOT to forward the email.   Your email address and everyone in your address book will then not get sold to spammers. 

And I know you don't care about this, because your work internet connection is "free" (it's not), but less spam means at least half the immensely ginormous amounts of useless personal network traffic clogging up the system will not be caused by your "accidentally clicking the wrong page" and having to tell me "I have no idea how my computer decided on its own to open my browser and load that porno/shopping/Beiber fan site or, on its own; download and install that Texas Hold 'Em app." 

Or would you rather the Draconian filters that most companies use nowadays that block basically any page you really want to see. Have fun staring at your company's phone listing and org chart all day. Why do you think they spent money on that expensive web blocking software in the first place? Security, help desk calls, and paying guys like me are costs they'd rather not incur. The IT department makes NO money for the company.  (Don't email with your little time-is-money arguments. You'll just sound more stupid)


The higher ups, muckity-mucks, and grand-poohbahs on the tenth floor HATE "wasting" money on computers and networks. And when they find out a majority of problems that make them pay guys like me to fix are caused by viruses, spam, executables and the like, they take away that day after Thanksgiving. Thanks, jerkoff.

I tried to send this out in memo form to everyone at my last job. As a network administrator, these suggestions would cut down volumes of work for me, make the CSRs on the help desk lose that panicked, deer in the headlights look, lighten the bandwidth load of the LAN itself, and just be an all-around educational experience.

I was denied. I guess they thought it was spam.