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 Post subject: The death of email as a reliable communications media...
PostPosted: Thu Apr 01, 2004 10:15 am 
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... or how to shoot yourself in the foot.

Up until recently spam hadn't been much more than an *extremely* annoying
inconvenience. Unfortunately this situation seems to be changing rapidly for the
worse, and it's not the disease that's killing the patient, but the cure!

Email always was a reliable means of communication, in which you knew for sure
that if a message could not be delivered you would at least get a bounce back
message informing you of the problem.

With the increasing amount of spam chances that your message was confused by the
human receiver as spam and deleted without being read increased a little bit,
but the odds were still meaningless.

Then people and ISPs started fighting back, people mostly with spam filters and
ISPs with spam blacklists. The problem is that spammers were now spoofing return
email addresses, so bouncing back the message to the 'original' sender was
considered pointless and didn't accomplish much more than just creating large
amounts of additional traffic. The result is that a message interpreted as spam
(or coming from a domain known to generate spam) now gets 'swallowed' into a big
blackhole.

This would be all fine and dandy if spam filters and spam blacklists were 100%
fool proof. But alas, they are anything but! Consider this:

My ISP is netcabo.pt, the larger provider of broadband in Portugal. They offer
fixed IP addresses within their allotted domain IP ranges to companies who need
it to run their own email servers, etc... The problem is that some of these
companies leave their email servers configured as open email relays. Spammers
take advantage of this and use their email servers to relay spam to the whole
world (thus making it look like the spam originated from that particular IP).
Users on the receiving end complain and the whole netcabo.pt domain gets
blacklisted!

To compound this problem, there are several spam blacklists out there. Some ISPs
use blacklist x, others blacklist y, others none at all and so on. My ISP's
domain might be blacklisted in list x but not in y. The maintainers of these
lists aren't exactly fast at fixing problems like this on their end either,
which is understandable in a way given the flood of email they must get every
day.

The end result of this is that when I send an email to a customer, if their ISP
is using a blacklist in which the netcabo.pt domain has been flagged as a source
of spam, the message is swallowed right there and then with no indication of
failure! The customer is unaware that I sent them a message and I am unaware
that the message never got to them!

Now take the personal spam filters. Most people install them and leave them at
their default settings... Not being technologically minded, they couldn't care
less about what is actually happening, they just feel very happy that the amount
of spam they received has decreased exponentially and leave it at that. Unknown
to them, larger and larger amounts of legit messages are also being blocked by
their spam filters.

They then get very upset with the software vendor when they fail to get their
order notification and registrations keys (which are actually sitting right
there in the middle of all those blocked messages) and even more when their
complaints seem to be ignored (I reply to them, but they never get my replies
because, once again, my replies are being blocked by their spam filter). I have
no practical means of communicating with these people because they effectively
managed to block me off - I can't even tell them to go to my company's message
board instead. They actually shot themselves in the foot and don't even know it!

So, email is now turning into a very unreliable means of doing business. I can
never be sure if a customer got my messages or not, unless he actually gives me
some feedback. This of course, ends up hurting all of us. The customer is upset,
with nothing to show for his money, and we become frustrated because all our
attempts to communicate with him end up in nothing.

It really can't get much worse than this... The ultimate result of spam is the
death of email as a reliable communications media and all the consequences that
will come from this. And it couldn't be more ironic that it is actually the cure
that is giving it the final blow, not spam by itself.

_________________
Jorge Coelho
Winstep Xtreme - Xtreme Power!
http://www.winstep.net - Winstep Software Technologies


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Thu Apr 01, 2004 2:04 pm 
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Joined: Fri Mar 19, 2004 1:25 am
Posts: 241
Jeez Jorge, that really is a bad deal. I used to use spam filters and lists, but I was running into the exact problem you described. I dumped the filters and lists, got Mailwasher, and my ISP instituted Web-Mail, which shows all the email the ISP thinks is junk. I get to see (I hope) all my email and I decide which goes to OE or not.

Sorry to hear about these kinds of problems. It's the opposite of what email is about. Maybe you could use this board with its PM feature to communicate with users. The user would have to sign up here of course, but it's a thought.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Apr 18, 2004 6:30 pm 
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Bump to top so more people get a chance to read about this. I am really getting tired of having messages bouncing back (and getting a bounce notification is already very good!) because spam filters are running way out of control! :(

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Jorge Coelho
Winstep Xtreme - Xtreme Power!
http://www.winstep.net - Winstep Software Technologies


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