No, not the stuff in cans that pretends to be meat. Spam in the sense of floods of e-mail messages.
Do you suffer from it?
How much of it is computer generated? You may be surprised.
Over the last 10-20 years the floods of e-mail generated automatically by computer systems has grown exponentially. I know people who may receive several HUNDRED e-mails in a day. How many of these are relevant? If a system is telling many people the same things over and over, surely there is a better way to do this? There usually is, but it takes time for the realisation that there ARE better ways to present information to people. Ways that mean they spend less time sorting out what is and is not relevant, without having to spend many hours manually doing a task better suited to automation anyway,
What amazes me is how often I am requested to re-set settings on various web sites to ensure (or at least try to ensure) that they do not flood me with e-mail. One blogging site that somehow couldn’t react to those settings was mailing me every time someone read my blog, every time someone liked it, and every time someone commented on it. So for one visit, I could receive 3 e-mails. Who on earth has time to read all of that.
So watch the space. E-mail is about to become as dead as a dodo (almost) as organisations aggressively find better ways to communicate what is important and relevant, and avoid the huge loads of unnecessary communications in a medium that is not the most efficient way to do this.
So for those of you just getting into mail (I have been using electronic mail for over 20 years) be prepared for more changes sometime in the near future.
Viewfromtheside's Blog 
I seem to go through patches of being SPAMMED! My biggest irritation is being CC’d on something that has little or no relevance to me, and then as everybody replies to all, I spend all day shift-deleting. My other pet hate is when somebody sends me a work notification and cc’s my boss, almost as if to say, now I’ve told your boss you’d better get on with it. makes my blood boil as I never shirk my job.
Email is so abused I think it will make quite a difference when we move to something else
I have avoided all email spam from blogs by switching to subscribe on Google reader. Works a treat
Well done. On letterdash when they couldn’t stop the span I just set the blog admin as my email address and let them get the spam.
Oh, gracious, change already? Erk…
Yup, the pace steps up!
I agree e-mail is becoming a nightmare.
There is a solution, get a different e-mail for all the notifications and things that aren’t important then just let them die off.
I object to the default settings that force so much email. And the waste of time and money involved behind the scenes to generate and manage the spam. Technology run riot is so stupid.
My favorite solution was to make the email address to send my spam to, their admin address, making the problem circular and all theirs.
I get no spam in my e-mails, and that on WP goes into the Akismet, so I just check it occasionally to make sure that there’s nothing gone there by mistake.
You have set it up well. Congratulations. WP is so much better managed that LD was
I am getting a lot of Spam on the Food24 wordpress site! it irritates me tremendously!!
There I just turned my e-mail address into their admin one, so that they had to deal with the flood