Will Read Your Spam for Money   2/8/2005 - 1,178 views,

Immigrant Laborers Hired to Delete Spam

SAN DIEGO—Executives at Gortman Consulting are hiring immigrant day laborers to delete their junk e-mail. “Our employees were wasting hours of valuable time sifting through spam,” Gortman CEO Donald Barris said Monday. “Finally, I was like, ‘Eureka! Hire some low-cost Hispanic laborers to empty our Outlook Express trashcans.’ Our IT van just swings by the docks in the morning and picks up a dozen or so guys. (Read the rest of the story at The Onion.)

[Of course, the Onion is a spoof 'newspaper' with funny, but not true, stories (in fact, Aunty is quite a fan).]

This would be even more funny except for, or perhaps is made more funny by, the fact that there is in fact a Toronto-based ISP called Pathway Communications which is doing nearly exactly that, only in reverse, sort of.

The service offered by Pathway (PathCom.com) allows you to have outsourced customer support people in India review your spam folder for you, to make sure that no legitimate email babies get tossed with the spam bathwater.

Really. Aunty couldn’t make this up.

Don’t believe me? You can find it here (look halfway down the page for “Spam-weeding service gets outsourced”).