It is difficult getting off of spam email lists or group mailings you simply don’t want to see every morning when you begin work. Some of them contain viruses and many of them preach ideologies you may or may not share, especially in the work place. Although it is not always followed, there is a code of ethics to business communications.
You can try and block them in Outlook but it does not always work. You can report IP addresses for spamming. You can respectfully request they remove your email from their list (good luck)– but it is especially difficult when the message may be coming from a customer or someone you vaguely know who simply assumes it’s appropriate to send a business personal messages with inappropriate subjects.
This gets even trickier when the sender doesn’t know the rules to group mailings and visibly includes everyone’s email address in the “To” section. Now your email is available to everyone else on the list even though you don’t know them and certainly didn’t give it to them. Your email gets picked up by someone and included in their group mailings, etc., etc., etc. Suddenly your business emails are on dozens of group mailings about sex toys, political rallies or church prayer groups.
For over a year I have tried to block a particular local sender from including our business email addresses in his volatile and caustic mass mailings. We do not know the gentleman and only a Google search informed me who he was. I politely requested that he remove any milpond.com addresses and I politely explained that we are a business and find it unprofessional to address religious, sexual, racial or political issues on our business computers.
With each attempt to have the sender cease and desist from including us in his mailings, he became more animated and increased the number of messages. The messages grew more distasteful and he now included personal notes challenging me, calling me a whiner and rudely chastising me. Emboldened by the attention of a perceived adversary, he wanted a fight. It became clear that road rage is alive in cyberspace.
I do not wish to participate in the manifestation of another Civil or World War so I just delete all emails from him when they come in, regardless of how frequently they arrive. Yet with each arrival I witness my emotions rise and watch myself being seduced by the power of my ego, which self righteously does not want my office and work computer to be contaminated with toxic fear or hate speech.
Alas, the joke is on me. Aware that I am anchored in my personal beliefs, history, betrayals and wounding it is clear that my perceptions create my stressful response to his desire for a cyber dual. After all, demands my ego, “Don’t I know the danger of stalkers?”…”Why should I have to listen to his ignorant ravings?”…”How dare he invade the privacy of my business.” My ego screams on and on ad nauseum.
It is all for naught. The world we live in is littered with anger. misinformation and fear and each of us creates that world. The cyber world is simply a mirror to our human souls- and few of us have unblemished and untarnished reflections.
There are a few things we can understand and the rest is left to the mystery of life. So I return to practicality and honor these pragmatic reminders:
1. Junk mailers will seize any address they can find to use as a ‘From’ address. They send their spam/junk emails using the same ‘From’ address that they use for the ‘To’ address, believing that you’re more likely to read the message. This makes it difficult to know who is really sending the message.
2. Usually with spam, the “From” address is not where the email came from. It is only an email address spammers purchased from another spammer or acquired by surfing the web or hacking.
3. You can block the email address in your email program and hope for the best. This cannot be done if it is a legitimate and known email address that was appropriated by a rogue. (You can usually tell if the sender is legitimate or not by noticing proper spellings and grammar. Spammers and cyber rogues don’t use spell-check!) You can call the internet service provider (ISP) such as frii.com or hotmail.com and report the abuse. (FRII is superb at responding to abuse and immediately takes action against the abuser.)
4. There are simply things you cannot change. You cannot always stop unwanted emails. Nor can you magically make the world a peaceable kingdom- we simply have not evolved enough. There will always be divergent views of sexuality, culture, race, politics and religion–and there will always be those intolerant of folks who disagree with them.
5. Consider that your neighbors, venders, and business colleagues may not share your personal views and do not include them in your messages without their permission. Provide them a way to opt-out and honor their requests. Better yet, do not even put them in the uncomfortable position of having to tell you that they’d rather not be included in any group mailings discussing your religious, social, or political beliefs. Trust me, the sex joke you think is funny could get an employee fired if found on a business computer. There are other venues for expression and free opportunities with social networking Try Facebook, My Space or Twitter. Use a chat room or start a blog. Find the appropriate venue for free speech and stand tall on your soap box, whatever your beliefs.
6. Diligently protect yourself against viruses and malmare by education, awareness and practice. Let the rest go and try not to allow your ego to be the master of your conduct. Let it be.
As I write this our son is sitting on the living room floor packing seven months of world travels into the suitcases that will return to his home in China. With care he hands me stones and shells from Robben Island, the place of banishment, isolation and imprisonment for 400 years off Capetown, South Africa. Surreptitiously he had gathered them from the garden and grounds Nelson Mandela had worked during his long incarceration. He quotes Mandela. “We accord a person’s dignity by assuming that they are good, that they share the human qualities we ascribe to ourselves’”.
I think of the email spammers and self proclaimed pundits that protrude on my business computer with an inner smile. All is well, all is well.
Jinx Davis, Millennium Group