Junk mail

When I was in my mid-teens, I watched a tv programme that presented a humorous view of suburban Britain, set around twenty-five years into the future. Two-and-half decades forward is an interesting time to speculate about, being close enough for most things to be roughly similar, but far enough ahead for some things to have changed significantly.  I recall that in the tv show there were some jokes about the improved taste of instant food and the widespread use of robot teachers at school, but neither of the two young people who were the focus of the programme had a mobile phone, which is perhaps the most visible lifestyle change that – in fact – occurred between the years when I was fifteen and forty.

One scene that has stayed with me, was a shot of the two teenagers walking down a street that was littered with rubbish, the sky busy with helicopters from which bundles of coloured papers were being thrown to the people below.  It was a time when bulk mail, as it was then called, had just started: in addition to letters, magazines, and the like, that were personally addressed to my parents – and, very occasionally, letters addressed to me – we would receive impersonal advertising material through our letterbox, usually promoting products for sale at a local store or supermarket.  These were delivered to every house in the street, sometimes with the mail and sometimes separately, as part of a blanket advertising campaign.  The tv show had imagined a vast increase in impersonal adverts, thrown directly into the streets from marketing vehicles in the air.  The idea seemed ludicrous, but at the same time a little worrying: surely, we would never allow bulk mail drops on this scale, creating vast amounts of unread and unwanted street litter.

Things have, of course, turned out quite differently.  Nowadays, I receive hardly any mail through my letterbox, since almost everything is delivered electronically.  Occasionally, an impersonal advert might be delivered – most likely for pizza – but neither my hallway floor nor the local street is awash with advertising material.  On the other hand, the junk mail folder of my inbox is daily flooded with unwanted anonymous mail.  Rather than shovelling paper out of helicopters, the advertisers (and fraudsters) have found a new way to communicate directly to the masses: automated email marketing systems or mail-bots.  There is, for sure, an important difference between marketing emails that I might have agreed to receive (often implicitly, by registering my email address on a website or mail-order form), indirect (and mostly unwanted) marketing emails that have been sent by advertisers who have somehow acquired my email address, and (wholly unwanted) mail from scammers who generally want to steal something from me.  These last two categories are, however, difficult to distinguish since it is only after clicking on a link in a junk email that one finds out whether it is a genuine advert or a scam.  It is best, I think, to remain ignorant.    

My standard approach to junk mail is to delete it all, but I find that I need to review my junk mail folder before I do so, since from time to time an email that I do want to read has landed there by mistake.  Therefore, most days I run my eye over the contents of the folder to check for something that might be worth retaining, before deleting the rest.  Last week, on a whim of curiosity, I decided instead that I would make a simple analysis of the contents of my junk mail folder, to measure in a rough way the sorts of mail that advertisers and scammers send me.  What appetites and anxieties are they appealing to, when they frame their messages, desperate for me to click on some link that will take me somewhere into hyper-space, where I almost certainly don’t want to go? 

During the week in question, I received 459 junk emails, which works out as an average of just under 66 per day.  (I did not include those highly annoying messages that somehow find their way directly into my inbox, although my service provider’s filters are mostly reliable and the number of these is probably only one or two per day.)  I made no attempt to distinguish between sales or advertising messages, albeit ones that I have no desire to read, and messages that are obviously scams.  Some of my junk mail seems genuine bulk advertising but I see no point in taking the risk: it is all deleted without being opened.  Based on the subject headline and the preview function, which allows me to see some of the contents of the message without opening it, I divided the emails into fourteen distinct categories according to what I am being invited to buy, discover, or respond to.

Top of the list in my junk mail folder are messages about my health, including the offer of helpful information about cures for dementia, toe fungus, and high blood-pressure, or advice about dieting, dealing with hair-loss, or treatments for sore joints.  Some of the messages start by telling me what the latest research from Harvard recommends while others start by telling me what doctors and medical professionals don’t want me to know, the senders clearly covering two significant sections of the population, those who defer to authority as a matter of course and those who ignore expertise as a matter of principle. Health accounts for 24% of my junk mail, closely followed by adverts for DIY or home accessories, at 21%, including power-drills or other tools, barbecue equipment, vouchers from department stores, recommendations for contractors, and of course discounts for use at pharmacy stores (which I arbitrarily determined to be a form of household good rather than a health remedy). 

The third largest category, at 14%, is an interesting new form of junk mail, in which I am either reminded that my subscription to a streaming service is about to expire, or that I have reached the limit of my cloud storage, or that I urgently need to renew an annual licence or service agreement.  Most of these emails are about service providers that I don’t use, but occasionally I receive a fake renewal message for a service that I do use, although these are so poorly designed that they are easy to detect.  Nonetheless, the rapid growth of online services in recent years has clearly created a sub-industry in faking subscription and service renewal emails, which I don’t remember receiving three years ago.

Fourth, at 37 emails in the week or 8% of the total, comes a miscellaneous group that are all about sex.  These vary from the offer of magic potions to improve my bedroom performance to the offer of a majestic performance in my bed.  The subject lines of these messages include a generous supply of emojis, mostly flames and aubergines, and are worded so implausibly that I imagine the various authors run competitions amongst themselves to see who can produce the most absurd claims, descriptions, or proposals.  Invitations to join dating websites were categorised separately and amounted to only 2% of the total. 

Offers of a new, cheap phone or some other tech device supplied 5% of my junk mail last week, just behind offers of low-cost finance or insurance at 6%.  Adverts for travel (cheap flights!) came in at 3%, along with invitations to join gambling websites (free spins!), and opportunities to reduce my energy costs (solar panels!).  I received a few random emails about US politics, none of which had anything nice to say about the current President, and several others advised me that there was a package for me awaiting urgent delivery. 

Perhaps the most interesting group – 13 last week, or 3% of the total – were messages advising me to protect my device from online viruses: click on the link for more details, they recommend, but I never do.  Most of these are generic in nature, but my favourite was a long message purporting to come from a hacker, which warned me that he had installed a recording device on my PC, which had filmed me watching porn videos.  He threatened to send these recordings to my employer unless I sent quite a large sum of money to his bitcoin account.  Hilarious, I thought, that someone was smart enough to gain access to my PC, take control of the camera which does not exist, record me visiting sites that I would never use, and threaten to send these to an employer that I don’t have.  Best of all, despite all this cleverness, the author could not manage to deliver his email into my inbox but ended up in junk mail instead.  Delete!

There were a few other messages, relating to pets, legal advice, horoscopes, and of course a lengthy message about a large sum of money that someone I had never heard of, living in a country I had never visited, had left for me when they recently died, and that would be sent to me immediately, if only I supplied my bank account details to the eccentrically named lawyer acting on their probate instructions.  Well, much as I would enjoy being the beneficiary of a multi-million-dollar bequest, I somehow suspect that my benefactor’s legal representatives will communicate by letter, to be delivered into my post box at my home address.

At the end of this exercise, I did wonder what my junk mail folder might contain in twenty-five years.  I assume that however good the mail filters become there will always be someone smart enough to find a way around them.  (No doubt some of the engineers who design the filters have informal employment arrangements with the companies that design the junk and scam emails.)   Assuming there will be plenty of mail in the junk folder, what will it be trying to sell me?   They say that the two things in life you cannot escape are death and taxes, but the evidence suggests to me that our two least avoidable anxieties are the declining functionality of our bodies and need constantly to renovate our homes.