No, I’m not being Quechup Spammed.

So nyah!

I hate, hate, hate social networking sites. I think everybody knows that by now. I don’t really see the point of them. I’m not terribly interested in actively meeting anyone new online, and I don’t need to sign up to yet another site to add the same people I’ve already added to MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and whatever the fuck. They know where to find me. I don’t need yet another blog on yet another social networking site, because I have my own website (and unless I crosspost everything 87 different times, or limit myself to only one networking site and somehow force everybody I know to check it, only a subsection of the people I know are going to see a blog entry on any given site, anyway).

But I will say this for social networking sites: they’re a terrific whitelisting tool. I rarely get spammed with add requests on any of the sites I’m a member of, and it’s very easy to deny comments and messages from non-friends on most of them, so I rarely get any spam at all. And since most of the people I know are crazy, and communicate almost exclusively through such sites and not through e-mail… I have not received even one invite to Quechup, because next to no one has my contact information in their address book (and the people who do, such as my mother, don’t really go in for social networking sites).

Despite that, I still prefer that you bastards e-mail me! I like the ability to backup, sort, search, store, and basically do whatever the hell I want to do with my messages. And I don’t like having to rely on third parties, especially ones (like MySpace) that frequently don’t work when you need them to. Plus, POPFile works pretty darn well at sifting through the shit for me. Spam almost never makes it to my inbox, even though I’ve just recently deleted my logs and filters to start fresh.

The one good thing about spam

The one good thing about spam is… if you don’t regularly get a lot of e-mail (I have notifications for things like MySpace, Facebook, etc. turned off, and don’t get much personal mail), it’s a good way to discover sooner rather than later if there’s a problem with your mail server. If it wasn’t for spam, that kind of thing could take me weeks to notice! Especially if the problem was intermittent.