Black On Stuff

Back in 1995, when I had my first contact with an email address and the Internet (I’ve created my first email address first with the university domain and then with yahoo.com, the email address that I still use it) I had no idea what the future will bring. Those days I had no worries, I was using a text terminal to access the email web interface on a VMS OS machine, I was in the first wave of those using ICQ (hey, I have a 8 digits ICQ ID) but I wasn’t bothered by what was happening on the Internet. Cause there was nothing happening. And never thought what is going to happen during next years.

Nowadays, after 12 years, nothing changed in terms of email technology: we’re still using a web interface to access yahoo email (yes, now it has Ajax technology, but it’s the same), we’re still accessing company email either by using IMAP or POP3 or Exchange protocols, we’re still sending emails via SMTP. Still, everything changed in terms of quantity of emails: I’m receiving tons of spam emails to increase my p…s using a magic V1@gr@ pill or surrogates, tons of emails to get a college degree in minutes or to get a huge discount by purchasing a Windows XP license or to buy a Symantec product. And nobody is doing nothing to put a stop on this. Oh, I have Mozilla Seamonkey with a good Junk email filter, I have an antispam filter directly on the email server, and this gets me through the day, but in the end, I still have to delete tons of emails daily and there might be a good one among those, so I have to take a brief look not to miss the good one. But still, this makes important emails that are marked as Junk to be answered only once or twice a day, which could hurt an online business. And it takes some time to do it, time that I’m not willing to spend on human-filtering spam emails. I have the same ritual each day, otherwise the number of spam messages will be quite high: delete, delete delete. All those meaningless V1@gr@ emails that keep on coming, hoping that one day I will be on their target.

I don’t think I’m the only one having this problem, and no one seem to do something real to stop this. I mean, don’t get me wrong, yahoo has the Bulk folder, hotmail has the Junk folder and google has the Spam folder, there are a lot of programs to help you filter the good from the bad, but it’s all the same. Everything is so relative. It’s only filtering a text they think it could be spam. But why not invest in something that could make the Internet world a better one? Is it that hard to change the current technology? Aren’t we prepared to do this? A few years ago there were rumors saying that yahoo will make you pay a cent for each sent email. This will not happened in the near future if there will not be a substantial change in the technology. Who’s gonna pay for this if it’s all the same? They started with the domain keys, but we’re not there yet. I haven’t seen any results yet.

Anyway, this topic came to me from one of my friend who’s good with names and titles. Hopefully it will not be treated as spam by any filtering rules on the Internet (cause now we have filters for everything: spam domains, spam snail mail etc.).