On Spam

Like everyone else under the sun in America, I received a handful of gift cards this Christmas from relatives who haven't known what to get me since I stopped playing with action figures. One of these was for Borders (not a bad call), so the other day I went to get a book I'd been wanting to read. At the desk, the guy asked me if I wanted to join the Borders Rewards club. It's free, you get one of those Kroger-style savings-accumulating cards, and they'll email you discount coupons to print out, he told me. There was no cost, so I figured I had nothing to lose; I signed up and gave him my email address.
A word about this email address. It was my old college email address, which I've guarded diligently from spammers by never posting it anywhere online. I've kept this email address spam-free for over four years by only using it for college stuff, personal emails, and Facebook notifications. It had never received a single piece of spam. I spouted it off to the guy at the register without even thinking, but figured it wasn't a big deal, as I'd only be receiving these occasional discount notices from Borders. Nothing unsolicited, right?
That evening, when I checked my email, I found a "Welcome to Borders Rewards" message in my inbox--along with a piece of spam. Over the next week, the spam kept coming in. It was pretty much the same sort of spam, too. No online pharmacy adverts, no offers to enlarge anything, no "SECRET CRUSH ALERT!!"s. The spam consisted pretty much entirely of scam emails, ostensibly from widows who wanted to put their deceased husband's fortune toward charities and for some reason needed my help with this, in the form of my bank information. Also, messages informing me that I'd won several hundred thousand dollars in some sort of national lottery, and they needed my bank account info to process it. Um, right.
Actual quote from one of these emails: "Congratulations once again from all the staff here on your cash award sum of US$500,000 (Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars) as charity donations/aid from the Vittorio Foundation, ECOWAS, EU and the UNO in accordance with the enabling act of Parliament which your e-mail addres was randomly selected by software powered by the Internet." My "e-mail addres?" "Software powered by the internet?" Sirs, you are so effing credible. It astounds me.
Since I've never received spam at the address before registering with Borders Rewards, it stands to reason that there's some correllation. This blog entry was originally going to be chewing Borders out for selling my email address to spam hucksters, but as I think about it, I'm not so sure. It might conceivably be that these Borders Rewards emails are not transmitted as securely as they should be--which is a fault, but a fault of negligence, not of outright consumer-exploiting greed. Alternately, it might not be the company that sold my address to spam scammers, but an employee who has access to this information. Abusing his priveledges for personal gain, you know? I do find it sort of hard to believe that a large-scale business like Borders would deal with these idiot spammers, whose schemes are almost as idiotic as the hypothetical people they're targeting. On the other hand, who knows whether Borders is actually aware of the intentions of their email-advertizing clients? For all I know, the Borders people selling email addresses in bulk could care less whether their clients use these emails for "reputable," "legitimate" unsolicited ads in your inbox. I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, or to what extent you can legitimately blame Borders for this, but the point is: think twice before you sign up for a mailing list, even if you sign up "in real life."
And more broadly, you can't expect large corporations to give a crap about your convenience unless it's profitable for them.