Eight Great Things About Spam

None of the following should be taken as an endorsement of spam or any related activities.

1. Spam filters provide a useful excuse as to why that email was never sent in a timely fashion. "No, really I sent that report yesterday. You didn't get it? Did you check your ISP's spam filter; maybe it's there?"

2. Spam filters can give an excuse why you never, "received" that email you never wanted to see in the first place. "No, I didn't see the note about having to attend that meeting. Maybe my spam filter caught it. Let me check. There it is!"

3. Spam itself can provide a viable career for rambunctious, computer literate youth in Russia, China and Korea. Without such opportunities, they'd be creating viruses which would erase your hard drive as opposed to just making your computer send unwanted emails.

4. Without 419 scam-spam, the nation of Nigeria would cease to exist.

5. Spammers are people too. The money and time you waste on spam results in sales which pay their bills. It's all part of the same economy. However, the same argument could be used to support increased tax rates.

6. Really, really shy people in need of male potency drugs may not know where else to turn.

7. Spam zombie networks have evolved into some of the largest parallel computing experiments in history. Some place there's a communications major with a minor in computer science who could do an exceedingly impressive thesis on this.

8. The presence of spam has resulted in increasingly powerful junk email filtering systems. The pattern recognition engines use relatively new algorithms exploiting technologies such as Bayesian filtering and fuzzy logic. Like the space program, these advanced efforts in scientific research will surely pay big gains in private industry in decades to come.

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