Spam and virus based email sucks which for the remainder of this entry will all be called spam because I treat it all the same.
I can tell when we hit the holidays because it seems the amount of spam increases by a near order of magnitude.
Does anyone actually ever buy things from spam? They must mustn’t they? Why else would people/companies keep doing it? Someone must have bought something at some point otherwise why spend the money on the bandwidth and time to do it.
I guess I am not so upset with spam as I am with messages that get falsely identified as spam because you have to crank up your filters so high you end up taking out hopeless victims. Then whomever sent you the message thinks you hate them because you ignored them.
I was reading somewhere that someone said that XML and RSS feeds will eventually replace email… At first I thought, what are they smoking, but then as I think of it more and more, it may work. Kind of hard to spam in that kind of an environment isn’t it? You are hosting your message from your account, no way to really spoof that because you have to have an agreement from the person you want the message to go to to actually come retrieve it, it is pull tech, not push… Have to work out how listservs would work though… I guess you could authenticate to post to the list server feed. This wouldn’t stop viruses from sending out messages but you would know EXACTLY who was infected so you can go over and whap them in the head for opening the Nude Britanny Spears email.
I wonder how well that would work in a business environment? What about for cold calling an email address? You would need some mechanism to alert the receiver to sign up for your feed. I guess that would be the next way of screwing with people, making them sign up for feeds they really don’t want…
Hmm I will put this on the backburner and let it stew in my head some more.
