But I Don’t Like Spam!
Tech geeks are predicting the demise of email, primarily due to the fact that 90% of email traffic is now considered “spam.” According to Dean Esmay, it’s the tech geeks themselves who are to blame:
It’s time for the major email protocols to be rewritten so there is one unified sending and receiving account. Furthermore, email must come from a verifiable domain name, and still further, the receiving server must be able to contact the sending server and say, “is this a legitimate user on your system?”
This isn’t rocket science, folks, but it will get rid of most of the spam problem. Or at least render it user-controllable again, so that you can block a spammer once and not hear from them again.
Personally, I got 3560 spam messages 5 days that I was out with food poisoning and mourning my beloved cat, Winston. It took me 22 seconds to delete them without reading a single one.
Jealous? You don’t have to be.
In our family, email is already dead. None of my five children (all adults) check their email with any regularity. My oldest does when she is in school because she is in a distance learning program. So I have to call them on the telephone to get messages out to the family. They don’t answer the home phone anymore either. They use cell phones almost exclusively.
We solved the spam phone-call problem by establishing a no-call list. That seemed to work very well. Perhaps we could create a no-spam e-mail list. And while we’re at it, how about a no junk-mail mailbox list?
The Libertarian in my is going into convulsions, but our economy is driven by advertising and it’s starting to become excessive.
I use Firefox and if an address is in my adddress book it goes to a special folder. I also check for special words and do the same. I get 300 to 500 emails perday and it has become impossible to read each one. I also use filters that put a large number directly into trash thou it does reject some legitimate emails.
When I see gobs of Email in my box offering me a chance to help some one smuggle money out of some 3rd world nation, or sexual products, loans, hot stock tips, blah,blah,blah I secretly dream of having a program that I can attach to the reply that will leave the receiving server a smoking molten pile of goo. I believe we should make the server owners responsible for sending those 300,000 Email for $35. My filters work well which makes the occassional spam that much more annoying.