Friday, September 19. 2003
It would seem that there are
a couple of people who seem to think that the era of e-mail is dead. The reasons vary, from the ever-popular "It just sucks my time away" to "There is too much spam". I'm sure you can come up with a few reasons of your own -- however I think that, even with it's downsides, e-mail is still one of the most useful forms of communication which I simply can't do without.
Before getting too hard on e-mail, consider how much spam you have to deal with in your day to day life. Turn on the TV to watch the news and your assulted with people or companies selling you things or ideas... Walk down the street and people stand on street corners handing out papers encouraging you to buy their product or buy into their ideas.. Answer the phone and you find people asking for donations, trying to sell you something, or otherwise wasting your time. You can claim the end of e-mail and swear it off, but not without consequences. If you're anything like me, e-mail has been a serious form of communication for years and to suddenly break off contact through it would mean breaking off contact with all of those people who I want and NEED to talk to. Of course, you can always substitute e-mail communication for phone conversations, etc.. but then you have to start filtering your phone calls. I assure you trying to field unwanted calls is just as, if not more annoying then their e-mail counterparts. You don't have a choice when you deal with a phone call, it just happens whenever they call -- at least with e-mail you don't have to open your client.
You haven't escaped the spam -- you've only changed the medium.
Considering the alternatives, I personally believe e-mail is an indispensible form of communication. Sure spam filters aren't perfect, but nothing is -- and since I don't see anyone offering a way to stop the guy on the street from approaching me with his spam, or the guy on the TV from pushing his spam I don't see what the big complaint is -- e-mail does better than most! On top of that e-mail is a wonderful form of communication for someone in my position (doing great amounts of business over e-mail daily). E-mail let's me deal with things on my own time table, and gives me the opportunity to mull-over things before responding -- something i might not have the chance to do on the phone. After my filters are done with my inbox (which I must admit are fairly liberal, allowing a lot of spam through), 99% of spam is instantly identified by me and deleted promptly as I am going through my box... My e-mail client even does a great deal of the leg-work for me by placing e-mails I know aren't spam (mailing lists, people in my contact lists, etc) into folders automatically. How is e-mail so bad? I wish i had this sort of noise-reduction in my day to day life!
For those of you who are suffering from a huge noise->data ratio when it comes to your inbox, here are a few things that I've done which
greatly reduced the amount of spam that shows up when combined with filters...
1)
Never, ever ever give your real e-mail address out to
anyone. Set up an e-mail forward account and give that out instead. So.. although my *real* e-mail address might be johnc@coggeshall.org (it's not btw) all public e-mail links to me are john@coggeshall.org. This "separation" between your outside connection to the world and your e-mail box will save you a lot of headaches if you ever decide to change your e-mail address, or you want to do something like described below. Otherwise, you'll have to setup multiple e-mail accounts, blah blah.. real pain.
2) Plan on phasing out e-mail addresses. Since your e-mail address isn't a hard-coded inbox, take advantage of it. When the noise->data ratio gets too high to deal with, create a new fowarding account and tell anyone of consequence to send all future e-mail there and put the new e-mail address on your web site, whatever so new contacts know how to contact you. Temporarily you can filter against that new forward account to ensure important e-mails are answered promptly while you wade through the junk from the old e-mail address making sure everyone who should know your new e-mail does. When I do this I retain my old filters against my contact db, etc which helps greatly by moving people you at least know into their own folder. As the transition continues you'll find yourself finding nothing but junk e-mail in the old e-mail address and virtually no e-mail spam in your new box. Of course, eventually this will have to happen again since there are some real asses out there who screen-scrape e-mail addresses from the web, etc.. but "john at coggeshall dot org" has been around for years now, and my spam is hardly a significant issue. Especially considering what it once was.
3) Whenever possible, spell out your e-mail address like I just did above. This is esp. true for signatures, web forum posts, anything that might end up on the web where screen scrapers can get to it.
4) Get yourself a dummy e-mail account from hotmail or your prefered web e-mail client to use when giving your e-mail address out any time someone is forcing you to give it to them, but have no real use for it. For instance, when I book flights and such I use my real e-mail address... but I use my dummy hotmail account on forums, or any time I know there isn't a chance in hell I'll give a damn about any e-mail they send. Since you have access to the e-mail account you still can respond to confirmation e-mails (some places do that to ensure you didn't give them a BS e-mail address), but won't ever have to look again.
Of course as I said none of these steps will keep you free of spam -- but considering the great majority of people in the world who use e-mail won't ever read this (or don't follow these practices), you make yourself significantly less of a target. The very nature of spammers is that they don't want to do a lot of real work, so the chances they'll come across your e-mail address when it's so much easier to get others elsewhere is perhaps the best filter of them all.
Well it's official -- I'll be at this year's 2003 ApacheCon in Las Vegas, NV. I'll be giving three talks while I'm there on a range of PHP topics including PEAR and tidy. You can find out specifics about my presentations in the Speaking Engagements section, or by visiting the ApacheCon web site at http://www.apachecon.com.