Re: your last email

No doubt, your morning ritual is very much like mine -- it includes wasting anywhere between one to five minutes (sometimes more) sorting through emails, weeding out the actual, important ones from the aggravating Spam. And have you READ some of those subject lines? Its bad enough I have to clear them out of my personal account, but it's embarrasing to have to clean them out of my work inbox.

But as aggravating as those are - they're nothing compared to the misleading subject lines. You know 'em -- Just like the one above. Or how about "Your input requested", "Re: our conversation", "Re: Hey there", and so forth. It's easy to click an email open based on a quick glance at the subject line, rather than the sender (we've all done it), especially when you've got twenty or so sitting there. And what happens? You're reading about how you can increase the size of something on your body, or how someone wants to do something to you that would make "91/2 Weeks" look like "When Harry Met Sally." Or Worse, the text inside the email is misleading, you click on the link, and you're taken to some adult oriented website.

Fortunately, the FTC is going to take a crack at stopping this practice. Their first target is Brian D. Westby -- owner of over 20 adult websites. Westby's been sending Spam emails with misleading headlines, providing non-working links to "unsubscribe" options and deploying the emails with false reply-to info. And they don't plan on stopping with Westby.

Will this make a difference? I'd like to hope so. But of course the realist in me says that for every Brian Westby they put out of business, there's ten more coming up with even more devious spam practices. They'll never be able to get everyone. But I suppose even one less Spam in my inbox would be better. Though some days, I'd never notice if it wasn't there.