McGarvey’s Words
by Robert McGarvey
re: Your Mail!
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McGarvey’s Words by Robert McGarvey re: Your Mail! |
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Here's What You Are Saying: Letters to McGarvey's Words . Back Pages: o Palms Away: Travels with a Palm. o Email-Country. Of Ricky Skaggs, cruising, Yahoo, and the ubiquity of email. O Google Spying: Much ado
about something good. o Ebay and the triumph of ecommerce. o VirtualOffice: The best travel bag.
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Junk email, obviously, is out of control and that message is clearest when I am sitting in a hotel room using a dial-up connection and I am painfully, tediously watching each silly cyber snippet download into my in-box. Refinance now! Get big! Go for porn! Buy Viagra online! Message after message they come, 38 this morning alone, and I did not read one of them. In my office they annoy me much less because that is a high-speed connection and, whoosh, they are all downloaded in a blink or two of the eye. It takes me longer to erase them than it does for them to download. But in a hotel, at 56k (or, often, 28k), as I watch this torrent of trash, I want to reach through the phone lines and throttle the senders. This a.m. I got no email that required a response from me, none that needed to be read, but I did get those 38 chunks of junk and they took about seven minutes to download, between the slow modem connection and the epidemic use of graphics. Yes, I have junk mail filters set up on Pocomail, the app I mostly use, and, yes, the majority of those junk emails go directly into the Junk folder – right now I checked my email and in came a Nigerian scam letter ("Confidential!"), hair restoration, and "You’re Approved!" All went into the Junk folder but, still, I had to sit there and watch this unfold via a dial-up connection. Many years ago I got my start as a writer-for-hire doing direct mail pieces for charities that paid substantial amounts to the Boston firm that employed me to concoct campaigns that would fill their coffers. Pretty quickly I realized that my writing ("There will be no happiness at Kamp Karma this Christmas, none at all, unless you sit down and write a check this minute!") certainly mattered in terms of the success of these fundraising campaigns but what mattered as much – more? – was the quality of the mailing list. Were these people givers? And, importantly, how many addresses were bad? No direct mailer can afford to waste money on bad addresses so returns from the Post Office are scrutinized, mailing lists updated, and in the old fashioned direct mail industry that stuff is routine. Not so in email campaigns because, to the mailer, there is no incremental cost in adding another email address to the hopper. At least the costs aren’t significant. And returns don’t matter, either. Remember, these mailers buy lists concocted by computer programs that randomly generate email addresses and, naturally, many of those addresses are just bad guesses. But who’s counting? Costs such as they are are absorbed by ISPs and, through them, their customers – who foot the bill for the ever-expanding disk space and Internet pipe needed to handle our junk. Senders get a free ride, paid for by us. So they keep sending and, judging by my impressions, the volume of junk mail is multiplying at a cancerous rate. Yesteryear’s 10 a day has become this year’s 100 a day. With a high speed connection, the volume of junk worries me because I fear that in my rush to delete I might erase mail that actually might interest me. (A word of warning: don’t send me email that uses "Hi" for the subject line. This morning I erased four such, all from a sender named Eloise, and if indeed there is an Eloise who wants to tell me something she better come up with a new strategy because I ain’t opening that email.) What can we do about this tsunami of junk? Tell me your ideas and we’ll post the best here. What am I doing to fight back against spam? For one thing I am not using any of those programs that require senders to be on an approved list for their email to get through. That is perhaps fine for a home user with a limited circle of contacts. Maybe. For a business user who wants and needs to hear from strangers (it’s called "new business" where I come from), techniques that require pre-approval are non-starters. I do set up as many filters as I can think to do. I put many senders on a banned list (doesn’t really matter to them because their addresses morph but I feel good, momentarily). And I’ve gotten very fast at glancing at subject lines and hitting delete. But, still, that does me no good when I am in a hotel room and emails are trickling in via dial-up. I am paying good money, and wasting my time, waiting for this load to dump onto my drive and that, increasingly, annoys me. The only good news here is that legislative voices are getting louder and, quite possibly, we are nearing the point where meaningful penalties will be slapped on junk emailers – but I don’t see that as a panacea because, frankly, more of my junk seems to come from abroad (sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, etc.). What’s the solution? Ever better server-level filters that screen out the stupid stuff before we need to download it. The risk of course is that the software will goof and junk Aunt Tilly’s email about Uncle Herb’s rejuvenation with Viagra – but as I sit in this hotel room watching the minutes tick away as still more junk downloads, please, hear me out. Server solutions, even with the risks, are the way to go. Is this foolproof? Nah. I stopped ever checking a Hotmail account because, even with server screening, it was so over-run with junk that I stopped seeing any benefit in logging on. AOL is getting better, but I’d still estimate that 75 percent of my email there is obvious junk. Yahoo mail is actually quite good about sorting out junk – only a few pieces a day go into my inbox and, to me, that’s a proof that this can happen. I am encouraged but I also am increasingly keen to see real answers. Especially when I’m in a hotel room and watching the minutes tick by as junk mail after junk mail lands in my inbox. What about you? Do you share my aggravation? Tell us and, maybe, the volume of our voices will encourage ISPs, legislators, and more to take action! We'll post your best emails here. Click here to visit Joe Brancatelli's Travel Site JoeSentMe.com Keep coming back, for more of McGarvey’s Words. Copyright 2003 by Robert McGarvey Taos Land Sale: Click For Details
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Have a cruise complaint? File it with Porthole Magazine's Ombudsman. McGarvey on Publishers Marketplace: Brain Wars About Robert McGarvey Author of How to Dotcom (Entrepreneur Press), McGarvey is writing a book on Brain Wars, the rise of cognitive science and the search for truths about thinking. A onetime columnist for BizTravel.com, he is a frequent contributor to dozens of magazines, ranging from American Legion to Electronic Business, Technology Review, and Rutgers. He has also contributed to Harvard Business Review. For the past five years, he has served as "The Ombudsman" for PORTHOLE Cruise Magazine. Still curious about McGarvey? Read up on him here. |
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