Spam is absolutely fab

If you have more than a modicum of good sense, you won't buy into the offers that are made. If you know your way around an inbox, chances are you will have set things up so that you don't even see most of it. The battle between spammers and those who would filter them out of existence seems eternal, but the spammers do not have it all their own way.

While network admins will complain about the volume of spam that clogs up and drains resources, for the average Joe, this is not such a problem.

What no one ever points out, however, is that there is another form of spam, a much older form of spam, that is alive and well. And it is a much bigger drain on resources. It's what I think of as ‘paper spam'.

How many times at the end of a working day have you gone to grab the (increasingly slim) paper mail in the letter box, only to find it overwhelmed by catalogues advertising power tools, bras, over-priced electronic equipment and pizzerias? Yet production continues unabated.

I recently came across this Australian site which is surely a step in the right direction for all the Dougies and Dorises of this world who do like their catalogues, but who don't want to waste paper.

Think about it for a moment. What goes into the production of ‘paper spam'? Trees. Printing with poisonous inks and dyes. Trucks to distribute it. Warehouses to hold it. People paid a pittance to shuffle about, sticking it in out letterboxes. And if, as inevitably happens, we don't want it, how much of it ends up not being recycled, possibly thrown onto the street, and washed down into our sewers. Which leads to where? Our oceans, rivers and seas.

Yet no one seems half as concerned with ‘paper spam' as they do with electronic spam, despite the production costs involved. Where are the environmental reports? Where are the corporate social responsibility acts? And how often, really, does anyone ever pick one of those catalogues up and think "Ooh, I'm going to go to Best Buy now and buy the USB Toaster in that catalogue."

For the rest of us, and for our increasingly degraded environment, it is also about time. µ