Email

Email

by Mike Masnick


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Remember When Email Was Fun?

from the not-any-more... dept

Another spam post that goes into the usual areas discussing the problem, but has one statement that really clicked with me: email used to be fun. You used to enjoy sitting down at your email and seeing who had written you an email. Now you fear the latest offers for viagra or porn. Even in cases where you have a pretty good filter set up, you wonder how long it will last. A good friend of mine just left for a week and a half vacation, where he won't have access to the internet. He knows that his yahoo email box is going to fill up with spam within a day of his being gone, but there's nothing he can do about it. Spammers have taken all the fun out of email and turned it into a chore. How nice.

7 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 

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  1. Remember When Email Used To Be Fun

    by David Cotovsky - Oct 31st, 2003 @ 5:11am

    Email can be fun, but people have to maintain their addresses, just like weeding and cutting the grass on your lawn. First, Hotmail and yahoo mail are black holes of SPAM. They are hopeless. Use a mail client with your ISP's servers. Or try Lycos or Netscape mail or some other free email service. And cultivate your backlist. make it harder to spam you than to block them. Most email clients incorporate this. When people wake up to the fact that you aren't helpless against spam, the sooner they can enjoy the email they desire to see in their in-boxes.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  2. No Subject Given

    by Chris - Oct 31st, 2003 @ 5:16am

    I agree Mike. I'm going to be on vacation for a week in Nov, with no access to email. I'm going to set my mail account to delete all mail tagged as Spam by SpamAsassain while I'm gone. I just can't face over 1000 emails that are spam when I get back.

    I also remember when the phone was fun too. The ring meant somebody you likely wanted to hear from was calling you.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  3. Exciting

    by Beck - Oct 31st, 2003 @ 5:58am

    When I first started using email I only received 3 or 4 messages a day. When the little dinger went "Bing Bong" it was exciting to go see what I got, just like when, as a kid, I received a personal letter in the mail.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  4. Spam is GREAT!

    by anon - Oct 31st, 2003 @ 9:45am

    If your one of those people who never gets email from friends and family. Spam can save you from the embarrassment of not have any email to check!

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  5. Re: Spam is GREAT!

    by Dr. Don Blake - Oct 31st, 2003 @ 11:56am

    I feel like Jay Leno saying this, but how much of a chore is weeding and deleting e-mails?
    I don't like it at all, but this country used to be farmers and iron workers pulling their bloody
    limbs out of threshers and white hot cauldrons of molten steel and still they trudged on ;-)
    ps Comcast keeps my home Spam almost nil and my company uses spamshark and its been good, too.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  6. Spam Pileup

    by Thomas Brown - Oct 31st, 2003 @ 1:12pm

    I don't get much spam because I only allow e-mail from work associates, friends and relatives thru the MSN filter; why other people don't put this practice into place is beyond me...

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  7. surfing the web also used to be fun

    by gary - Nov 1st, 2003 @ 4:38pm

    Don't forget the web. Surfing used to fun and now it is like going through a mine field.

    What's bad is that you establish what you think are trusted sites and then they start throwing cheap stuff at you. I guess they justify it because everyone else is doing it. As an example, I stopped visiting usatoday.com. I have them in my pop-up blocker just in case I forget. Unfortunately, that's just one of many.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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