Soliciting

Note: Before reading My Thoughts, please read My Disclaimer!

By Telephone

It's your phone. You pay for it. You answer it. It's about time that you can actually control it. Thank you, federal "do not call" list. It is long overdue, but at least it mostly works. Stop phone solicitors by registering your phone number(s) at donotcall.gov. It works. To help enforce the rules, report violations at donotcall.gov. Companies can be fined up to $11,000 per call!

Not surprisingly, politicians exempted themselves (and charities) from the "do not call" list. (As always, they seem to forget that they are there to serve, not to make rules for their own benefit.) One reported solution is to contact your county official in charge of voter registration and have them remove your telephone number from the registration for each registered voter in your household. (Apparently, the county voter registration information is given out like candy to political candidates.) In Maricopa County, Arizona, that's handled by the STAR Center of the Recorder's office. I've done it, but it is too soon to tell if it really works in reducing the annoying calls. Please let me know if you've had experience with this method.

By Fax

All unsolicited faxes are illegal! Report offenders to the FCC and make them pay!

By Doorknob

Opening your front door to unknown people (that turn out to be solicitors) is a waste of time and potentially dangerous. Having solicitors litter your doorknob, garage door or driveway with their advertisements can tell would-be thieves that you are not at home. Plus, you have to clean up the junk they've left behind. Tell them all that you are not interested by posting this sign. I have ours in a window that is right next to our front door. From where I sit in my home office, I can see my front door...and I'm in there for much of the day. So, I can tell you that the sign is almost completely effective in keeping my door free of unwanted debris...as I've noticed countless would-be disturbers move on without bothering us.

By Mail

Take back your mail box! Send your mailing information to this address and within a few months you'll see your junk mail decrease significantly (but certainly not entirely):

Mail Preference Service
Direct Marketing Association (DMA)
PO Box 1559
Carmel, NY 10512

Also, opt out of credit card offers by calling 1-888-5-OPT-OUT (1-888-567-8688), which is managed by a cooperative of the three credit reporting agencies. That's good for your mail box and it helps prevent identity theft, too.

By E-mail

Unlike their Mail Preference Service mentioned above, do NOT use the DMA's e-mail opt-out service, though, as that is completely ineffective. Spammers are far too unethical to actually use an opt-out service, and there's no significant legal enforcement against spamming right now, so it is actually counter-productive to supply them with your e-mail address.

Let's back up a minute. First, know that presently 85-90% of e-mail is spam. Now, you (hopefully) don't receive all of that in your Inbox because your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and anti-spam organizations such as SpamHaus are working hard to filter out as much of it as possible.

Spam exists because 4% of online adults purchased a product or service advertised by spam. And, that's more than enough to justify the effort to spam everyone. Spam also exists because the Internet is global and most governments lack the will to hold violators accountable. If society lynched a few of the worst spammers, perhaps we'd be winning the battle, instead of losing it. Or, if you'd like to be a bit more proportional in dispensing punishment, conservatively estimate that each spam takes one second for someone to delete a single spam message. Top spammers send out millions of messages per day. Have them serve jail time based on how much time of ours they waste. A typical big spammer who is in "business" for just a month wastes as many as ten person-years. Let's lock 'em up based on that formula.

Until governments decide to aggressively pursue spammers, here are some tips to avoid spam:

• Use your business e-mail address only for business.
• Use your personal e-mail address for other things.
• Don't give out an e-mail address online unless you absolutely have to do so in order to conduct business/receive services.
• Create and use a free webmail account (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, etc.) for use when services require registration/confirmation with an e-mail address but you really don't want to receive any (other) e-mails from them. Do this despite their statements about not spamming you. If they were going to spam you or sell your e-mail address to spammers, do you really think they'd let you know?!
• Don't ever use web sites such as greeting card sites, as they generate spam for you and for the recipient of the greeting.
• Don't put your e-mail address on a web site or provide it to someone for display on a web site. (Spammers harvest e-mail addresses off of web sites.) Use mail-to forms that obscure your e-mail address, instead.

The bottom line is that the only way to prevent spam is to withhold your e-mail address. Virtually all after-the-fact spam detection and elimination methods carry with it the risk/certainty of incorrectly deleting some small percentage of your good e-mail messages. Even one missed e-mail message from a business prospect can make you wish that you had your spam back again. Remove lists and remove links in spam don't work -- those just notify the spammer that you still exist and actually looked at the e-mail. So, they'll add you to more spam lists (or sell your address to someone who will). If you don't want spam (and I suppose only 4% of us do want spam), then protect your e-mail address. Once you get on spammers' lists, you never really get off.

On a related note, who hasn't received forwarded e-mails from well-meaning friends? Some are actually informative or entertaining. The problem is that most of them are just not true. Or, you've received that forward many times before. And, most of the web sites that generate the "cutesy" greetings are just vehicles to gather e-mail addresses for spamming.

Please, please... Before you clog up someone's inbox, check the forward at snopes.com. And, if it does prove to be true, consider resisting hitting the send button if Snopes says that it has been around for a while. We've most likely seen that one before...a few times! If the message is generated from a web site, save us both a lot of spam and skip it. And, if it is some sort of chain letter, please also leave me out: I don't believe in that sort of thing.