(no subject)

[prog]

I think that I lost faith in email some time ago, and haven't really noticed it until lately. The point of awareness may have come with the receipt of two whitelist challenges within days of each other, both from technically minded individuals. In both cases, it happened that I hadn't emailed that person before, so their whitelist software challenged me to do a little dance to prove that I wasn't a spammer.

Conventional wisdom says that whitelists are too much trouble to deal with, and will block legitimate mail when the sender becomes too annoyed or impatient to jump through your hoops. This is not me; I gladly hoop-jumped in both occasions, because I really did want to talk to these people. But I know that not everyone feels this way, and I'd hate to turn away a contact just for misinterpreting my spam-blocker as an insult.

But meanwhile, I am getting more than 100 spams a day, and more than rarely the spam-filters I have installed over every account produce false positives. So I every time I don't hear from an expected writer I gotta put on the hip-waders and start slogging through the thousands of all-caps and misspelled and Korean subject lines in my spam-bucket, looking for a possible misfile.

Worse, when I send mail, I try to keep in mind that the receiver might be using filtering too, so I feel I must try to second-guess it. I can't just send files to people without including a paragraph or two of text; I have to be careful with the subject lines I choose. And even then I don't feel certain that it will actually get to their mailbox, no more than I'm certain that I'm seeing all my legitimate incoming mail.

What are my alternatives? I don't think I have any; nothing really works like email does when it comes to sending, well, electronic mail. So I will still use email, but I no longer trust it as a stable communication medium, as I once did.

Comments

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

Yeah... I've been getting more and more spam at my 'granicus' account despite the filters I have. Sometimes I think the internet is a gigantic failure and nobody has quite realized it yet.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I certainly don't agree with you about the entire Internet. The ol' horse has held up remarkably well, as far as I'm concerned. But email as we know it is an important subsection of it that was designed around assumptions that, as it happened, just didn't scale.

[queue.livejournal.com]

Everyone you would ever want to email should read your LiveJournal. When you want to send them a message, you make a post filtered to them, and the conversation can be carried out in the comments section.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I actually caught myself thinking this way recently, too! I recently harangued Karl into getting an LJ (hi Karl!) after I was all persnickety about making future Gameshelf casting calls only to filtered LJ posts, and after he did I realized that a couple of other people who've been on the show don't regularly read LJ either, since (like Karl) they have their own blogs. (RSS is great, but it only works with public posts.)

I yesterday split the difference by making a public casting-call post, which had the effect of making some remote gamer friends feel bad, exactly the sort of thing I was trying to avoid with the initial filtered posts. Bah, fooey. I might actually end up dropping back to email for this one. I dunno.

I've been saying this for a very long time.

[kyroraz.livejournal.com]

http://www.livejournal.com/users/kyroraz/268602.html

I actually hate email now.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

You could be like Peter St. Andre and go Jabber-only.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Well, stpeter does that half for promotion of his own technology, of course. And he uses email too, if grudgingly. (His was one of the two whitelist systems I tripped, in fact.)

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

I'm using SpamAssassin on a fairly out-of-the-box setting, and the false positive rate is minuscule. (I eyeball the spam folder before trashing it each day, so I can say this with some confidence. Hint: keep it sorted by subject line -- makes eyeballing very fast.) Just about all the false positives are people sending jazzy HTML email from hotmail accounts. And technical people (the majority of my email traffic) don't do that anyway.

The false negative rate is, er, majuscule. 10%, maybe. But having to see ten messages in my inbox instead of 100 is a worthwhile improvement.