I always ignore email invitations to social networking sites, so if you’ve been among those I have “snubbed” lately and in the past, no offense meant. It’s not that I don’t like you, but the idea that my name, email address or my birthday will be added to a database I have no wish to be a part of does not appeal to me. I have this paranoia about becoming too public on the Internet. Not that I am not. After all, maintaining this site is public enough. And I do some work in the outsourcing industry and have had to submit my profile to a lot of professional databases. But that’s as far as I would go. Social networking? Not for me.

Of late, Yahoo’s anti-spam feature has been failing to screen out a lot of annoying junk emails so that these end up in my inbox. You wouldn’t believe how many units of Motorola RAZR I’ve won just in the past year. (I bet you’ve won some, too.) Or how many thousands of dollars’ worth of gift certificates I’ve received. And would I be interested in buying cigars, vitamins, or viagra? These, on top of the emails whose subject lines contain intentionally misspelled words or phrases made up of words randomly put together that they make no sense at all, just so they can get past the filters.

I consider emails from social networking sites as junk. Like I said, I am paranoid. I suspect they’re part, wittingly or unwittingly, of the process that audacious spammers use to gather email addresses. Some of these sites give you the option of importing your entire address book so they can automatically send invites to everyone of your contacts. This is certainly one of the ways that our email addresses get blasted into the World Wide Web. How else would we all be receiving unsolicited emails on a daily basis? They never tire, do they? The junk mails used to get my goat so easily that I couldn’t help but curse these spammers. However, I’ve been thinking: there really is no point losing my cool over them since the mails are likely automated. What’s the point of cursing a robot program that automatically sends millions of junk emails daily? I can only manually delete the spam emails that escape the bulk folder, resigned to the fact that I have no choice but to do the same thing every morning. In the meantime, I have to do everything to minimize junk coming into my inbox. And that includes ignoring emails from social networking sites. So consider this my apology to those whose invites to these sites I have turned down.

Filed under: March 2007, Technology | You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.