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Richard Hammond just spammed me

I am told that there are some people who actually enjoy receiving spam.

Perhaps these people have no friends and consider anything that falls into their inbox to be an indication that at least someone loves them; or perhaps they are just mentally unbalanced.

Personally, I hate spam and those who pollute my mailbox with it.

In recent months spam levels have been pretty low. The dismantling of a major spambot network went a long way to reducing the amount of junk email that was floating around the net but now things are returning to normal.

This hike in spam levels is partly due to the Conficker virus that now infects an unknown number of PCs all around the world.

My various mailboxes have seen a huge surge in spam levels over the last few weeks and now that there are those seeking to cash in on swine-flu hysteria, the spam volume is set to rise even higher.

But there's one company and its representative that I never expected to see filling my mailbox with their unsolicited commercial email.

But, desperate times call for desperate measures I guess and this morning I found an email sitting in my inbox from Telecom, with the subject line: "Telecom’s XT Mobile Network is coming".

Was this a press release directed to me as Aardvark?

No, this was an unsolicited commercial email promoting Telecom's new XT Mobile Network, complete with huge graphic images and encouragement for me to link to the promotional website they've put up.

Geez, I don't need a life-sized, pot-bellied Richard Hammond staring me in the face while I eat my porridge!

Now while I might be a Telecom phone/broadband customer and they might think this gives them the right to send me emails promoting other products or service -- I certainly do not.

I am not a Telecom mobile customer and, after this rude piece of shotgun marketing, I'm even less likely to become one.

Of course there is an opt-out link in the email but isn't that a bit like walking up to someone on the street and punching them while saying "if you want me to stop you only have to ask"?

No I'm sorry but Telecom have spammed me and I'm not happy about it.

If they want to promote a new product or service, sending out unsolicited commercial email is *not* the way to do it. This kind of spam-campaign puts them right up there with the nice Nigerian banker who wants to send me TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS and the potion-pitchers offering me pills to make my studly-bits bigger.

But hey, in an era when we're still being charged an excess for over-cap data transfer, perhaps Telecom saw this email (with the more than 100K of images it loads) as a chance to also generate a little extra revenue. Yes, that's right -- we should always remember that it's the recipient who effectively pays for spam so Telecom are charging *you* to receive their marketing pitch.

So the message concerned is now marked as spam (which will make it more likely that others will not see it because it'll be diverted from their inbox to their spam folder).

Telecom -- go learn about OPT-IN and why it's a much nicer way to handle your emailed marketing messages than opt-out.

I wonder how many of those who might sign up to the XT network will find themselves constantly barraged by a raft of "buy this, add that, upgrade your phone now" type messages from Telecom once they're onboard?

After all, if it's as fast and has as much bandwidth as they're implying, they could send much more spam to customers in much less time -- couldn't they?

Did you receive this spam from Telecom?

Have I simply been oversensitized to spam by 15 years of constant exposure?

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