I sometimes wonder if Google shouldn't have a big button in the middle of their homepage that reads:

Or perhaps they already do. To judge by some of the mail that we get, I can't rule out the possibility.

Today's rocket scientist used our mail form to send a one line message that read:

can not get on search and win it says it has problums

A little investigation revealed that before sending this, the sender had breezed past an entire page of Google search results (with the website that he was actually looking for prominently displayed in first, second and third position) and picked the link to a page on our site from half-way down the second page. He then successfully ignored all the text on the page that might have told him he was not in the right place, and lunged straight for the link marked with a little envelope icon so that he could ignore a final pop-up warning message and triumphantly send his message to the wrong place.

I know, I've bitched about this before, and it's getting old. But believe me, this happens twice a week most weeks. Yesterday, I had someone mailing me asking for a copy of an invoice. Two days before that someone wanted a commemorative plaque. In the early days, I used to helpfully explain that they had the wrong website and even try to point them in the right direction. Now, I just ignore them.

I don't bring this up simply to vent. There's a point to this, which is that many, many people simply do not understand the World Wide Web. If someone can blaze through a page and a half of search results and unerringly pick the wrong place to send his message, that person is a prime candidate for getting phished. He has no idea what website he's on, he has no idea what the site he's looking for looks like, and it's a safe bet that he can't recognize an insecure connection or a suspicious URL. His misdirected message is good reason to think that he completely lacks the basic 'street smarts' necessary to use the Internet safely.

Spam feeds on stupidity. If you think that sending $60 to some con artist will make your penis bigger, you're stupid. If you think that buying a piece of paper that says you have a PhD from a “prestigious, non-accredited university” will make you look good at your next job interview, you're stupid. If you think that a penny stock is a good buy because a total stranger mailed you out of the blue to recommend it, you're stupid. And if you think that someone in China is really going to sell you an iPhone for half price or that Prince Paul Demango of Nigeria really has forty-five million dollars to share with you, you are dumber than a box of rocks. But there are people who believe all these things, and the proof of that is the unending torrent of spam in your inbox every day.

The trouble is that stupid people keep spammers in business. Each time some half-wit buys a bottle of sugar pills, answers a message from “Natasha” or signs up for “World Casino”, the spammers get proof that spam works. And then we all have ‘problums’.