It’s true! Everybody hates SPAM, but “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.” Why is that? It’s because Sara Lee is always sweet. Spam is about as appealing as a pig’s shoulder, which is, as it turns out, one of the commercial product’s main ingredients.
How Spam E-Mail Got Its Name
It all started with a Monty Python skit about the commercial product – Now available in 18 different varieties! Yuck. The skit is about a woman who doesn’t like Spam trying to order breakfast in a pub where every menu item comes with Spam. The combined annoyance of the woman trying to order something without Spam and the typical Monty Python droll and droning humor led to the name “spam” being attached the plethora of undesired emails filling inboxes everywhere.
How to Control Spam
Spam is. You can’t change the fact that it exists, but you can control how much of it gets into your house. Here are a few tips.
- Use your provider’s spam filter. Your email provider knows that you don’t like spam. They don’t like it either. That’s why they have provided a spam filter feature for your convenience. Look for it under the Settings menu. Like call blocking, emails from addresses that you list in the filter will not be delivered to you.
- Identify spam as spam. Every provider offers an option to mark single emails as spam – just like Hormel does with its mystery meat. Once you mark an email message as spam, that information goes to the filter and subsequent messages from that sender email address will fall short of your inbox.
- Set up email accounts with multiple providers. Once you have done that, use on or two of those accounts exclusively for responding to website requests for your contact information – especially if your visit is “one and done” and you don’t want them pestering you. All their follow up and solicitation emails will end up in an account that should contain nothing but spam. Works like a charm – and it costs nothing.
How to Avoid SPAM
- Stay out of Aisle Five. That “Cleanup on Aisle Five” you’ve heard about. That’s the SPAM police clearing the shelves.
- Beware of Amazon. Yes, SPAM is available on Amazon in singles, in 12-ounce cans, and by the case. Which begs, the question, “Who would buy SPAM by the case?”
There you have it. Here’s hoping that you receive no more spam, but something nice occasionally from Sara Lee. Nobody doesn’t like something from her.