Skip to main content

Email address purity and Netiquette

As with many people who have been using the Internet for some time I have many, many email addresses; ISP pops, web mail etc as well as the addresses I maintain for the domain names I own. Some of the addresses I've had for many years and of these most I no longer use in earnest - often due to the shear volume of spam.
Many of these addresses are purpose specific - I have addresses for each band I run and for my 'record label' etc.

A couple of years ago I set up a new domain and associated email addresses (all of which I access via forwarding to Gmail) and knowing how SPAM works I have made every effort to maintain the purity of my in-box. This is something I had managed to do with some success until about a month ago. Now the trickle of SPAM has turned into a torrent and I can trace the event that triggered it.

One of the music promoters I have worked with had my private email address a while back as I was away from the net for a few days while we were finalising the details of a gig, and unlike my band email address, I can get my personal mail via a cell phone.
Then last month, horror of horrors it arrived - a gig listing mail out with about 100 email addresses IN THE CC FIELD!!!!!
Now thanks to a couple of compromised mail boxes by members on the list the SPAMMERS now have my purest of email addresses.

I don't really blame the promoter in question - BCC is often misunderstood, and the consequences of a large CC list are not really understood by e-mailers at large - but in the interest of all those who don't want to help the SPAMMERS I call on every one to spread the message - 'USE BCC'.
If ever there was a case for the value of netiquette this is it.

Fortunatly I find that Gmail's SPAM filter works very well, but the 'count' next to the SPAM folder link offends my eye and I can't not zero it at every session!

Comments

Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
2:20 pm
Anonymous said…
Try a .name address - nearly 4 years, about 99% spamfree!
2:21 pm
Techiedog said…
It'll make no difference is someone adds it to a CC list!
2:45 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Art of the state

A few weeks back I was working with the dev team at WGC on some interface design for our product prototype. We came across a point at which we have to give the user the ability to indicate their desire to save a current state. As we discussed the various ways in which we could visually indicate a 'save' action button, I realized that as a whole the industry has settled on the image of a 'floppy disc' such as this: Now in this day and age the floppy disk is an anachronism - have any of the myspace generation even ever seen one? It is certainly a few years since the average family PC came with a floppy drive as standard equipment and an online life requires little in the way of tangible media. - and yet the iconography persists. The more I thought about this however, the more I came to think that if we needed to provide a user action which is exemplified by an outmoded concept, then maybe we should rethink our interface and indeed application architecture at a deeper lev...
3 comments
Read more

Pro-ams, Prosumers and Innovation

As a team, Technology Research has been paying a great deal of attention to the importance of the end user in the process of innovation and development. We have witnessed over the last couple of years how companies and organizations such as Amazon and Google have benefited by opening up their innovation process to amateur enthusiasts and how others such as Flickr who have made Web Services API's available for experimentation have added value to their product through enhanced capability, flexibility and functionality developed by third parties . And there are many, many other examples. In concept the hacking, adaption or customization of software is not new. The home computers of the early 1980's practically demanded end-user programming, computer Games 'modding' has been around almost as long as computer games have and the definitive open-source example of Linux shows what can become of enthusiast lead development. What is new is the fact that smart organization...
Post a Comment
Read more

Silicon Valley and Everywhere else

It has been an interesting month with a lot of exciting work with a lot of smart people taking up my time. I've had my head down and been doing some serious graft and hadn't really noticed the minor details like the fact that I'd bounced between three continents , changed my time zone 8 times and taken eating out with all meals accompanied by technical debate and napkin sketching to be the normal way to consume sustenance. Then last week I had a reality check when I suddenly realized I was in fact doing for a living something I dreamed of as a kid. So, what prompted this moment of clarity? Well, I looked up and found myself hurtling down the 101 between Burlingame and Palo Alto in Silicon Valley in the back of a rented mini-van, MacBook balanced on my knee , hacking some last bits of code together for a product demo I was about to deliver at Stanford University ! Now I may have been doing the relatively easy job from the technical point of view of getting the Rails co...
1 comment
Read more