Email in 2030
As predicted by Mark Brownlow. My favorite? You can still buy 1 million email addresses for $99. It’s still a bad idea.
As predicted by Mark Brownlow. My favorite? You can still buy 1 million email addresses for $99. It’s still a bad idea.
Al Iverson has a post up about his experiences with customers who try to acquire email addresses through appending.
J.D. Falk has a post up about the history of DKIM.
Al posted a clip from the Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar on SpamResource (slightly NSFW) that resonated with me this week.
If you meet me on the street and ask me what my job is I’ll tell you that I work with companies who send bulk email to make sure that they’re not sending spam. I do this by educating clients into good practices and teaching them how to send mail people want to receive. What this statement doesn’t tell people is that usually clients find me because they have been suspended by their ISP for spamming or blocked by some receiver.
Clients who find me because they can’t send mail usually hire me to solve their immediate problem. And I do give the the best advice I can to resolve their problem. But fixing today’s problem isn’t enough, you also need to fix the processes that caused the problem. To me, a critical part of my job is to set clients up for long term success by creating procedures that will get them delisted and keep them from being relisted in the future.
Sometimes, though, I have those moments Al is talking about. When clients don’t actually want to fix their problems, they just want to argue. They want to argue about the definition of spam. They want to argue about permission. They want to argue about how awful their ISPs are for suspending their account. They want to argue about CAN SPAM. They want to argue about free speech. They are angry and they want to fight.
My role is to listen to them, then guide them down a constructive path. I do turn out to be the sounding board for a lot of customers, sometimes they just need to know someone is listening to them. Once they get it all out we can move on into solving the problem.
But, boy, are there the occasional conversations where I just want to scream, “JUST STOP SPAMMING!”
It’s Friday, it’s been a long week and while I have things to say I’m looking for some entertainment.
What are your favorite spam subject lines?
Here are some of mine:
“Having rock-like winky is easy”(OK, I admit, sometimes I’m 12 and “winky” makes me laugh)
“-Enlarge-your ~Penis up to 3 per month!” (Up to three what per month? And every month?)
“-Its all about the bra-” (From yourscalecars, advertising penis enlargement. Uh. Really?)
“!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” (apparently spammers never got the memo that !! is bad in a subject line)
“Adventures of my giant mighty soldier” (uh. back to being 12)
“Aliens spotted” (I always thought aliens were striped)
“allergic to almonds or pecans?” (well, no, but thanks for trying)
“anxiety’s archduke Bourbaki’s” (uh. What?)
And, well, I’ve gotten through the a’s in my spamfolder and there are something like 200,000 messages still to go.
Do share some of your own in the comments!