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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.
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.
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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.