I Haz a Newsletter
by wjw on August 1, 2014
So now I’ve got a newsletter, to which I urge you to subscribe. Because though the same announcements will probably appear here, the newsletter will turn up in your inbox instantly, and you won’t have to even turn on your browser.
I promise not to send you a whole lot of crappy spam. Or even non-crappy spam (if such a thing exists). I’ll only exercise my Awesome Newsletter Powers when I have an actual announcement.
Technology goeth on apace. And I goeth with it.
Email. I used to do that, once.
I rode the wave of the spamocalypse for a few years, until the “push me, shove you” draconian approaches of many providers turned into de facto denial of service points. When some bozo up the chain decides to block everything coming from comcast, or .edu, or other huge parts of the internet he doesn’t like, and his opponents retaliate, the users are stuck in odd little Balkanized ghettos.
After twenty years as a heavy mail user – I was on over a hundred mailing lists, and I was sending about a megabyte a month out – I got tired of getting every fifth message on a list, or having people call me on the phone saying they’d emailed me about something half a dozen times, was I mad at them?
Email isn’t quite dead yet, but its feet have been nailed to the perch for a while.
Frankly, I don’t understand why you’d want to use mail and “probably” put the same information here, but it’s your playground.
Email still works, SPAM can be managed, and mailing lists that *don’t* manage SPAM don’t last.
I’m on something like to 200 mailing lists these days, given that there’s 300+ entries in my .procmailrc file. Messages for some of those come to me via a commercial SPAM filtering mob (mailroute, http://mailroute.net/) and some come straight to my server running Postfix (http://www.postfix.org) via postscreen.
Given that my primary e-mail address has been spread about the internet in various forms since last century, and I’ve had my own domain and mail server for most of this century, I get maybe a dozen SPAM messages a week through the various filters.
I have various Hotmail, Yahoo!, and gmail addresses as well, some of them get more SPAM messages in a week than my entire domain!
And I run a couple of mailing lists, no SPAM gets out on them!
So I will be subscribing, as one of the best things about email is that once it arrives on your system (and you’ve backed up said system) it’s not going away!
Indeed. I never found a way around the Balkanization problem. Perhaps it’s not as big of a deal now.
My mail archives go back to 1986, though. I got on board late, but I spent as much time in my mailreader as anybody…
Spam has gotten better in recent years I think. The filters have gotten more intelligent and the spammers are pursuing other methods of separating people and their money. In fact, I regularly check my spam and I’m a bit sad at the poor quality of the scams anymore. It’s like they’re not even putting effort into it. What has come of this new generation of spammers?
The demise of e-mail is much exaggerated.
Our own private e-mail list serve has subscribers that number in the four figures, almost all of them bold-face named professionals in the relevant, associated areas, or bold face professionals in other areas that are interested in what we focus upon.
Love, C.
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