Which Spam Annoys you Most?

Sure, all spam is annoying - that's inherent in its definition (unwanted commercial e-mail). But all spam is not created equal, and some types are more annoying than others. In fact, some types are downright infuriating.

It's a subjective matter, so my nominations for "worst of the worst" may differ from yours. On my husband's and my small business network, our server-based spam filters catch literally thousands of spam messages per day. We never see those unless we have reason to suspect a legitimate message has been filtered and go wading through the quarantine folders on the server. My client-side anti-spam program catches another hundred or so. They're sent to a special "junk mail" folder that I can peruse from inside my e-mail interface if I want.

That's a whole lotta filterin' goin' on, but some spam still manages to sneak through, up to a couple dozen per day. Most of them are a lot like the junk mail you get in your snail mailbox: straightforward ads for software, loans and other products and services. There's no need to open the messages to know they're spam, since the subject line says something like "Get XP, PhotoShop and Office cheap" or "The Best Online Gambling Site" or "Get Ce1eb_rex here" or "Could you use an extra $1000 a month" or something else that's clearly commercial. I can quickly select all of these and do a mass delete, taking no more than a few seconds of my time.

Slightly more annoying are those that attempt to disguise their true nature but fail. You know, the ones that say "Your order has shipped" or "here's the info you requested" in the subject line. Usually a quick glance at the sender address is enough to tell me that I didn't order anything or request any info from that sender, and they, too, get zapped in one fell swoop without my ever opening or previewing the message itself.

Then there are those that could be legitimate messages. The ones that simply say "hi," or "Introduction" or something similarly vague in the subject. If you only correspond with a limited number of people using return addresses you know, you could sort those out pretty easily, too. However, as a writer, I get e-mail from readers, offers for work from publishers and other legitimate messages from people I don't already know all the time, so I often have to preview these individually to find out if they're real or they're trying to sell me Viagra. That starts to take time, and that annoys me a lot.

Because of the nature of my work, I sometimes need to receive HTML mail, so I don't have that blocked. Occasionally one of these messages with an ambiguous subject line also turns out to contain a bandwidth-hogging full color picture. Bad enough if it's a picture of some piece of electronics gear they're trying to sell me. But ten times worse are the rare times when it's a disgusting pornographic graphic.

Speaking of porn, even though they're immediately recognizable for what they are, I also hate those spam messages that contain a bunch of sexual language in the subject line. Even though I never read the message itself, I feel just a little bit assaulted by having to read the subject lines. And what if I had young children who used my e-mail account?

However, the full color spam that advertises porn sites probably doesn't do nearly as much damage as the plain text ones that conjure up some make believe relationship between the sender and recipient. You know, the ones with subject lines like "Last night was fantastic - can't wait to see you again." I often wonder how many spouses who aren't familiar with the ways of the spammers see those messages in their husbands' or wives' inboxes, resulting in all sorts of grief.

Of course, the spam scams (such as "phishing" messages that purport to be from your bank or credit card company and the multiplicity of variants on the tired old Nigerian scam) also do real damage, mostly to Internet newbies who fall for the frauds.

Then there are what I call the "Outlook-sticking spams." These are messages that contain external links or scripts or other components that cause your e-mail client to freeze up completely and stop working. The only solution is to shut down the program and open it back up, then delete the message without previewing it.

With so many types of spam bombarding my e-mail account and given the sheer volume these days, I'm thankful for good filtering programs like iHateSpam. Without them, e-mail would have been rendered unusable.