Posted on 26/12/2021 on Trivia – The Spice of Life
Your mailbox – obviously not the physical letter box which is now passé – is always overflowing. There are many sections in your (email) inbox. One of the many sections of the inbox is the junk email section. It is this section which is the repository of all munificence as well as wizardry of the world.
Before moving any further, a simple definition of junk email would not be out of place. The dictionary definition of junk email is unsolicited mail that consists mainly of promotional materials, catalogues, and requests for donations. I am sure we can completely relate to what this exactly translates as. When you access your email, you find that very often, the largest number of unread mails are in the junk email category.
Research for this post threw up some very interesting (and scary) statistics regarding junk email:-
- Spam accounts for 85% of the total email traffic worldwide.
- Advertising makes up 36% of all world spam content.
- 26.5% of all unwanted emails are related to financial matters, the third-biggest spam email category.
- For every 12,500,000 emails sent, spammers receive one reply.
- Microsoft accounts are the most popular targets of phishing emails, accounting for 43% of all phishing attempts.
Glancing at the junk email folder without taking the trouble of opening any of them is a very good source of entertainment. The subject and the partly visible first line can provide great insights. Your junk email folder is all about serendipity. There are so many of them out there, who (generously!!) want to share their fortune with you. They are eagerly waiting for you to respond (or take the bait?!) so that the fortune can be shared.
At first glance, the emails in the junk email folder confirm your conviction in the innate goodness of the human race. The reality however dawns only when (god forbid!) you respond to such emails and innocently do as you are asked to (in them). The ask generally is a small prepayment or parting with your bank account details. It must be said here in no uncertain terms that opening an attachment or a link in the spam mail could prove ruinous. All these emails are only meant to lead you down the garden path. Thus, the best thing to do is to just see the folder and chuckle. If you do happen to open any of these dubious emails, they could appear like what is shown above.
Bloggers too face a problem of receiving comments which fall in the spam category. The problem however is compounded because sometimes well meaning comments with numerous links are automatically marked as spam. I have read the comments of many bloggers who admit facing this issue while responding to their readers.
To conclude, spamming is a problem that one has to live with in the virtual world. One can while exercising utmost caution and not falling for the trick, still have some fun by merely reading the subject. Every cloud has a silver lining, after all.
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Trivia 
Oh god!
I daily have to clear at least 60 to 80 spam comments on my wordpress account. That’s really frustrating and annoying. Irritates a lot of course. But once in three months or so, a genuine comment lands up in spam folder and retrieving that comment leaves me heavily satisfied. Hence I haven’t disabled the feature. There was once an opportunity to be out of it forever. But I lost it purposely.
Anyways, it was fun to read the post.
Anup
🙂
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Thanks for reading, Anupji! I face the same ordeal. Like you, I also sift through a lot of junk in the hope of finding a genuine comment.
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Anita,
Spam mail/folder is a problem we have learnt to live with. The irritating part now is some genuine mails landing up in Spam folder. Since we do not look up at the Spam folder, we lose track of genuine mails, until we come to know of it when it is too late.
There are now clever spammers who have learnt to beat the filter by creating genuine-looking mail ids.
A harmless fun is, provided you don’t fall in the trap, to find that the the trustees of many African despots who died intestate, find me the most trustworthy person on the earth and give me his billions of dollars of hush money for a small fee. I have lost track of counting zeros, but I must have become the world’s richest man.
AK
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Thanks for reading, AKji! I hear you. Since you mentioned African despots, I wanted to mention here that he Nigerian Prince scam in fact is the most notorious one. Ypu may want to read more about it. Here is a link. https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/nigerian-prince-scam-social-engineering/
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