When you buy something online, there’s a little asterisk beside the box for your email address. That means you absolutely must fill it in and, for the purpose of that order, it’s a good idea because you get an immediate email acknowledging your order. It’s like a receipt.

What happens next, though, is that you’ll get emails for years from the vendor offering you more stuff. If it was just one marketer, no big deal. The problem is that people like me, and you probably, order a lot of stuff online from all kinds of companies who email you and email you and email you and email you until your inbox is jammed every day with dozens of solicitations from the same companies.

It’s water torture of the Inbox. I don’t even know what some of these companies sell anymore. Cherry Moon Farms? No idea. Frontgate? Who knows?

Even some of the companies I do know apparently don’t know me. Borders and Barnes & Noble should know by now that I buy books from them, only books, lots and lots of books, but no movies or music despite their endless pleas for me to buy some.

If marketers all got together to figure out how to be a collective huge pain in the butt, they couldn’t have come up with a more effective approach.

Delete, delete, delete, frigging DELETE.

How can we stop it? Simple. One quarter of one cent postage for any email sent to a US address. A dollar for four hundred emails is no big deal. But a million emails a week will cost $130,000 a year. Give the money to charity, burn it, origami it. The point isn’t the revenue, it’s the cost, the cost of annoying millions of innocent people whose only sin is that they occasionally order stuff online.