It seems most people are throwing the baby out with the bath water. Yes, spam is annoying, but to move to a situation where you cannot contact prospective clients under any circumstances (whether digitally or not), without first being given permission, is patently ridiculous. It is like political correctness gone beserk.

Many of your commenters find themselves in sales positions, and I think they are being disingenuous. It is highly improbable that their customers happen to seek them out. The point is to find an acceptable balance.

A point to ponder; I bet these same pious types, are quite happy to receive junk mail in their post boxes, which takes a larger effort to get rid of, and has an environmental impact to boot. So why the double standard?

It seems most people are throwing the baby out with the bath water. Yes, spam is annoying, but to move to a situation where you cannot contact prospective clients under any circumstances (whether digitally or not), without first being given permission, is patently ridiculous. It is like political correctness gone beserk.

Many of your commenters find themselves in sales positions, and I think they are being disingenuous. It is highly improbable that their customers happen to seek them out. The point is to find an acceptable balance.

A point to ponder; I bet these same pious types, are quite happy to receive junk mail in their post boxes, which takes a larger effort to get rid of, and has an environmental impact to boot. So why the double standard?

My brother had stopped using his Hotmail account, but he didn't tell anyone. So one day I open my email, and there's an email from him. It says he's traveling in the U.K. and lost his wallet and needed $3,000 wired to him immediately. My first reaction was that I didn't have that kind of money. Then I looked at the email and realized that he hadn't used my name or his, that the money was listed in foreign currency, then U.S. currency (being American, he would have listed U.S. currency only), and the grammar was poor in the way suggestive of a foreign speaker. As it turned out, he'd left his address book in the account when he stopped using. Someone hacked into it and sent out the same email to everyone on the list, including his boss and all the family. Since he really was traveling–but not overseas–I emailed as many people as I knew to tell them it was spam and my brother was okay.

I'm a writer, and over the years I've been on a lot of message boards. One message board seemed to draw the self-published novelists. Invariably what they would do was realize that their book wasn't selling too well, head for this message board, and spam all the posters. So I would get emails from writers advertising their 80 page books fro $20 on Amazon. The strangest though was this one writer who emailed me out of the blue suggesting we exchange autographed books. Huh?

I also ended up having to put any unassigned emails on my Web site go to into the null address. Spammers will take Sales@myDomain . com and send emails through it until they got caught. Since some of the emailing was set up as forwarding through my primary email, I came back one day to find one hundred rejected emails. My virus checker had spotted and virus and killed the email.

What I do get, as a journalist, is an amazing number of press releases. It can get overwhelming. I use a special e-mail address for sites that I think are likely to send me a lot of marketing spam, and I filter my work e-mail so I'm not getting dinged with press releases when I'm at the playground with my kids.