An Appreciation of Spam

This week is SPAM™ Appreciation Week in the UK. Of course, they're celebrating the canned meat that helped win World War II, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to come up with reasons to appreciate the other kind of spam. 1) Spam makes you feel wanted Everyone hates the empty feeling in their gut when they get home from a long day at the office, open their postal mail box and discover... nothing. No mail. There's that tiny little 'nobody loves me' pang. Spam makes sure you never have that feeling when opening your email inbox, because there's always something. Today, a sales pitch for fake luxury watches; yesterday, a notice that the long-lost great-aunt you didn't know you had in Nigeria has passed away and left you millions; tomorrow... who knows? 2) Spam is making the Internet better Spam is, by many estimates, as much as 90% of the email on the Internet today. That much extra mail requires lots of extra network bandwidth (between ISPs and from ISPs to customers) to make sure every packet gets delivered in a timely fashion. More spam? Spend more money upgrading your network and servers yet again, find new ways to optimize connections in equipment you already have, or look for ways to improve the protocols used to talk between networks. Everybody wins when we can find ways to push more data around. Speaking of buying new equipment, that leads me to... 3) Spam helps the economy Even in these troubled times, network operators and ISPs are going to continue to need to upgrade servers and network equipment to handle the extra load from increasing spam, thus releasing precious capital back into the economy. Add to that the money being spent on those fake watches, and the fortunes to be recovered from those long-lost Nigerian aunts... we might almost be able to solve the financial crisis right there! 4) Spam makes people smarter Not immediately, of course, and I'm not talking about "Make your brain larger" spam. Recipients of large amounts of spam are getting smarter regarding where and how they give out their email addresses as well as what to do with the mail they do get. Sure, there are still plenty of people who open every attachment they receive, but many more people are wary about opening things from people they don't know, about keeping their anti-virus and security software up-to-date, and about how to report spam to their ISP. They're also less likely to give out their email addresses without checking privacy policies, or perhaps to have one email address for private mail and separate, disposable addresses for online signups. Given all this, I can see why folks in the UK could be celebrating spam. It certainly does have a bright side or two when you look at it the right way, doesn't it?