Terry Zink's Anti-spam Blog

i have a phobia of cars and moving objects...

i dont have a phobia,

im so0o0oo lucky huh=]!?

hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia - fear of long words, kinda ironic eh?

I have a fear of opening alluminum cans

I dont know what its called but I have a fear of big nipples

i have a fear of moving objects and noises that repeats itself like police car sirens

I don't know if there is such a word(s) but it should be. Obviously some of my customers and associates definitely have a dreadful fear of spam.

It's amazing to me that how an a small few of my recipients, who get spam on a daily basis, want to hang me from a flag pole from my entrails, if they get one from me.

I think it's because they know where my message is coming from, and want to take thousands of spams that can't do anything about, out on me.

The sad part is, I don't feel i am spamming, but instead just keeping people up-to-date on information.

I guess I should have sympathy for them. Spamaphobia is a serious psychological disorder, and may stem from the persons first spam encounter that caused emotional or psychological distress.

How do we help spamaphobics?

Treatment for Spamaphobias (paraphrased from http://phobialist.com/treat.html)

Spamaphobias have been quite effectively treated with behavior therapy. The behaviorists involved in classical conditioning techniques believe that the response of phobic fear is a reflex acquired to non-dangerous stimuli.

The normal fear to a dangerous stimulus, such as a "Nigerian Letter", has unfortunately been generalized over to common spams as well. If the person were to be exposed to the non-dangerous general spam time after time without any harm being experienced, the phobic response would gradually extinguish itself. Also, this assumes that the person does not also experience the dangerous stimuli during that same extended period of time.

In other words, one would have to come across ONLY general spam for a prolonged period of time for such extinction to occur. This is not likely to occur naturally, so behavior therapy sets up phobic treatment involving exposure to the phobic stimulus in a safe and controlled setting. Foa and Kozak (1986) call this exposure treatment, so called because the patient is exposed to the phobic stimulus as part of the therapeutic process.

Okay, I'm joking here, or maybe it's a real phobia. Who knows.