The Email You Know And Love Is About To Vanish

from the bye-bye dept

Kevin Werbach, who is apparently feverishly preparing for his big SuperNova conference that everyone is talking about (and which I’ll be attending), has written an article for Slate predicting the death of email as we know it because of spam. His argument is that spam filters can only go so far before they become useless. When you’re getting 500 spams a day, even a small percentage getting through is a huge nuisance. He believes that we’ll eventually all move to whitelist-only emails. Thus, you’ll only be able to receive email from people you’ve specifically designated, or those who need to jump through an extra hoop to reach you. We’ve discussed whitelists before, and I have an aversion to them because it still seems wrong to require someone to take an extra step to contact me (why am I so special?). However, as the spam issue gets worse and worse, and the whitelist solutions get better and better, I find I’m slowly changing my opinion.


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Comments on “The Email You Know And Love Is About To Vanish”

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3 Comments
Al says:

No Subject Given

Yeah, same here. I can’t tolerate the amount of time lost in deleting spam. I find the worst spam is through mail that is registered at hotmail (and has a short login name) and ones that I use for contact details on my domain name.

It drives me crazy and I have never, in six years online, responded to a single spam email, I have never even met anyone who admits to responding, yet somewhere along the line they must be profitable or surely it wouldn’t occur (?)

Mark T. A. W. (user link) says:

Check out MailShell

Check out Mailshell.com
They give you an infinite number of disposable e-mail addresses, so you never have to give out your primary e-mail address to anyone you don’t want to.
If any one of them starts receiving spam, simply set the rules to delete everything that goes to that address
http://www.mailshell.com

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