« Attention! Musical History in the making! | Main | Kids on Campus game ideas Session 1, Summer 2006 »
June 14, 2006
New email addresses... (mini-rant)
Maybe I'm just feeling grumpy today, but here's something that I'm finding really annoying these days... People changing their e-mail addresses "because they're getting too much junk at the old one." Is it really that bad? I get gobs of spam at my email addresses, too... but I'm not changing them until I absolutely *absolutely* have to. Pretty much every reasonable web-based e-mail provider has spam filters that do a pretty good job... gmail, yahoo, hotmail... Do you really get so much spam that even this doesn't work for you? For those of you that use clients (like I do, Mac OS X's Mail.app) can't you turn on the filtering and get trusted people's email addresses into your address book so that the program can recognize them and let them pass through? I sympathize with you about spam... I get it, too! Everyone does!
Even the most "well-protected" email addresses will eventually get spam: Even if you only tell your best friends... There are quite a few scenarios, but here's an example: All it takes is for one of your friends to send an e-mail to you and to include others in the To: or CC: lines. Now someone else has your email address in their computer (also in the To: or CC: line of the message you got)... If it's a good "forward" or something, now that same message (usually with all of those email addresses included) gets sent out to other people, or worse, to mailing lists, and pretty soon, someone has a computer with a virus that sends its email address book out onto the web and the addresses get harvested by spammers. No, it doesn't happen immediately... But there's a very good chance it will at some point.
The biggest problem I have with changing your own email address is that the only people that it inconveniences are YOUR FRIENDS in order to make YOUR OWN life easier (and often only for a little while at that!).
Am I wrong in this? Do you agree? Disagree?
PS: This is not directed at anyone in particular. Easily hundreds of people know my e-mail address(es)and I get plenty of these types of messages regularly.
Posted by Andrew at June 14, 2006 04:34 PM