meerkat,of course you can get spammed with junk mail, regardless...

meerkat,

of course you can get spammed with junk mail, regardless of having subscribed to certain content or not. People really don't seem to understand much about how these things work. There are massive lists out there for sale to anyone who wants to buy it, giving these sites and companies the information they require to spam away.

In fact, the biggest problem is people who forward on emails containing heaps of email addresses, from past and present, rather than keeping and respecting the privacy or peoples email addresses, by cleaning the emails up, removing previous email addresses, and also by using simple methods to mass email all your friends without disclosing the emails of all the other people who are getting the same email. Some emails I get from people contain dozens of addresses, which is quite disgusting, and unnecessary.

All it takes, is for spambots to harvest your email address (from anywhere on the net, and also your own private PC or other peoples pc's who have you address), and you will find that all of a sudden you are now on a spam list, and receiving all sorts of spam email. It is quite simple. Best thing is to have an email address that is used for subscribing to sites (eg free email from gmail or equivalent), and one email address which is private and only for friends. But, as I said above, people can unknowingly have their addresses and their contacts lists harvested through malware contained on their PC through no fault of their own.

So, those people you are judging are very likely innocent of any wrong doing. What it comes down to is misinformation, and education.

These days, ISP's are getting better and better are stopping a majority of spam, especially the clear cases. So those who don't get much spam could probably assume the ISP is doing a pretty good job. At peak times of the year, over 7 out of 10 emails being sent round the world are spam, so it is in their interests to keep it contained.

Cheers.