Hello everyone What do you think? Which is more annoying? Spam mail or junk mail? Most people would say spam mails are more annoying than junk mail becasue we are being bombarded with them every minute (since we spend most of our time online anyway). We even have Federal and State Laws prosecuting people who spam! But what about junk mails you receive everyday? Why don't the lawmakers do anything about that? Everyday you receive unsolicited credit card offers and whole slew of junk mails and they are actually adding more risks to the consumers like identify theft, stolen personal information, etc. Frankly, junk mails create a whole lot of environmental problems to our society than spam mails do. Just go visit your nearby landfield and you will know what I am talking about. Spam mails? Well, it sits in the junk email inbox and I just click once to empty them when I feel like it. I don't agree with SPAM either but at least it's paperless. Which is more annoying? I would have to say junk mails! JC Creator of http://www.TheFreeAd.com Please read About Us
a guy over here in the uk has been fined £80 for the following. Whilst going out his front door the postman handed him his post which contained nothing but junk mail. Rather than go indoors and put the rubbish in his own bin he used the bin on the lamp post outside his house. The council have fined him for misuse of a public litter bin. Surely the junk mail companies are 99.9% responsible for him placing his litter there. The council in question are a joke, fining someone for using a bin. They stated the law on the subject on the news and one thing I learned in English literature is that paragraphs should not contain too many commas and there should be a maximum of 3 sentences to one paragraph . When the news reader showed the text describing the law a solicitor and a judge would have a hard to deciphering it. I agree junk mail is every bit as bad as spam. In fact spam costs less because you can just press the delete key whereas junk mail has to go in your bin which fills up the bin bag. I wonder how much money I would save on bin bags every year if I didn't get junk mail. And another thing........ Why do people like Walmart insist on selling scissors in moulded plastic. Basically you buy a pair of scissors and then have to buy another pair to cut the first pair out of their wrapping.
I think the scissor wrapper is to avoid lawsuit in case a child hurt themself But why is it okay for companies to sell your information and you end up getting all these junk mails (which I think it's totally nuisance) and it's not okay to send spam? I must have at least 5-7 junk mails offering me free credit cards every week. Now do I need that many? Did they ask for my permission before they send those mails to me? If the answer is no, then why should email be treated any differently? I wonder if anyone ever tried to sue companies for getting all these junk mails :H
I hafta agree w/ you freead, and btw, applicable nick. I despise junk mail and junk faxes esp. cos they are more environmentally damaging. Junk faxes in the office are esp. a pet peeve of mine cos they are usu. ads for toners, paper, cartridges and offices receive dozens a day PER machine. They actually use their ads to deplete your toner just so they can get you to buy more :$ , that's absolutely repulsive. They waste the resources and hence the money of those who did not request the ad . I don't get junk mail, only rarely, but that's cos I took an active part to get off mailing lists, you can get the details in [thread=117051]junk mail/off the list thread[/thread]. If it seems like too much work, part of it was that my mom used my address as a forwarding address for herself. She changed the mailing address to those she cared to keep correspondence but she left it up to me to deal with HER junk mail. And I did deal with it and no more junk mail, see that thread. If I can get around to it I would like to put my attention to the faxed ad conspiracy, just like I did with junk mail. I think it should be against the law to fire more than one ad per receiver. Ad companies SHOULD NOT be allowed to send more than one ad per fax machine IMO. I don't get spam so much so the ones I do get I'm tolerant of. Banner ads I'm also tolerant of as long as they do not demand too much resources. Basically it comes down to the payload if you will. The cost in time and resources to receive the ad. If receiving the ad is gonna cost me I get pissed off cos why should I have to pay for unsolicited ads??? Eventually I get around to doing something about it and then the ad company will have just shot themselves in the foot cos of their stupidity. With email, they are time consuming cos many ppl read their email sequentially so they lose time loading up a message that turns out to be spam. And time is money so the payload is high. Take some of these banner ads created with Flash, they consume your PC resources, slowing your system to a crawl and then you can no longer tolerate it so you DL flashblock and then no more Flash banner ads, yeah, real effective marketing . Whereas banner ads that use the resources lightly, I let them go and don't do anything to remove them . I understand that companies need to advertise and ads create jobs and I'm one of the most tolerant person I know when it comes to ads. But I take an active role to encourage ads with low payload and for those ad agencies that have high payloads, I do my best to put them out of business, or at least to force them to change and lower their payload.
I don't have a problem with banner ads. If you visit a web site and they have banner ads they are probably using them so they can afford to keep their site content free. Web hosting however cheap does cost money and even the smallest site can use banner ads to pay for the cost of web hosting. A successful website can clear over $500000 in banner ads within a year and so if I get free content and have to scroll down past a banner ad then so be it.
I agree. It's a total waste of tree. Of course we all can do our part in recycling all the junk mails but what about all the chemicals used for getting rid of the inks from those papers? They are doing more harm to our environment. Of all the junk mails I get everyday, here is the one that I think is troubling for the consumer: unsolicited check payable to the consumer. If you read the fine print, it's actually like a loan with very high interest rate if you cash the check. I strongly suggest everyone to shred these kind of junk mails because if these mails were in the wrong hands, it can cause serious financial problems. Oddly enough, I don't see any Senator or Congressman thinks this is a menace to the society but it's definitely an oppotunity for ID theft.
"unsolicited check payable to the consumer." Is it only institutions that one has an account with that issue those. The issue company is taking a huge risk of being scammed themselves. It's not cheap to bring a deadbeat to court and have them pay up. They may sucker some chickenshits into paying up but others would scam them in return
another thing I hate is when you buy a newspaper or magazine all the leaflets that fall out of the middle. The worst leaflets are the little scratchcard type things where you undoubtedly are assured you have won £5000 or more. To claim your prize you have to ring a number.... Now read the small print.... I live in the uk but I'm sure you have the same thing in the US or wherever. The phone number is charged at a premium rate at a minimum of £1.50 a minute (doesn't say what the maximum is). Minimum call time is 9 minutes. Based on just those figures that is £13.50. (not taking into account what the maximum fee is and how long the call really lasts). Then the small print goes further........ We have the right at any time to change the rules of the competition and if necessary we can and will cancel the competition without question.... So basically you phone up spend at least £13.50 doing so only to be told you've won diddly squat and there wasn't really a prize in the first place. If you are gullible enough to fall for one of these scams then you will probably be suckered into their next trick where they try and sell you a timeshare.
When i was little I used to get so excited by those scratch-cards, I mean, I ALWAYS won! You notice on them that there was always one big prize and thousands of keyrings to be won though. How gutting would that be, spending over £10 on phone bills to win a keyring!
I have noticed a spike in junk main primarily from credit card companies. I think it started to get worse when the credit card companies passed that bill they have been trying to pass for 3 decades now. the one that makes it harder to file for bankruptcy. There must have been something else in there allowing them to just bombard our mail box's. I am going to start writting 'return to sender' on everyone piece and mailing it back. At least they will pay twice the postage.
the funny thing is I got a poor credit rating some years back yet they still send me leaflets even though I would not get a card if I filled in the form.
