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July 22, 2003 Sure, we all are getting way too much Spam in our e-mail in-boxes right now. It is tedious and annoying and all the lame jokes about Viagra and Nigerian Scams are just wearing thin. It’s junk mail, plain and simple, and thus is quite easily dismissed. Unfortunately, there is a very real and somewhat tragic side effect to all this flood of unwanted e-mail besides the obvious annoyance of having to delete hundreds of junk mails, namely, we are becoming conditioned to dismiss genuine e-mails as well. When e-mail started gaining popular appeal, it offered a wonderful new means of communication between people. Faster than a letter, yet somehow more detailed and comprehensive than a phone call, e-mail offered a way of immediately communicating with someone that you cared about in a fashion that also allowed you the kind of slightly removed space needed to think out a message a little more carefully, as you might in a standard letter, but to also get an immediate or almost immediate response. And to those of us who had been bemoaning the death of the written word, e-mail offered new hope as millions of young people started writing again. Yes, the purists among us cringed a bit at some of the e-mail only slang that started cropping up (R U a Sk8r?) but even that was tolerable because it meant that young people were grabbing hold of the language and molding it to their own device. The future was bright. And e-mail also seemed to fit into our increasingly more hectic lifestyles. We could shoot off a more detailed note to a friend, rather than fumble through the regulated awkwardness of leaving a phone message, all from the comfort of work, or home or in the middle of the night if the mood struck us. Our friend could then have the leisure of replying when they were ready. But then the same folks that had been flooding your mailbox with tons of useless paper, figured out that they had a whole new and cheap method of marketing to (annoying) consumers. In our consumer driven society, it was inevitable that this new medium would be over exploited in a very short time. Rough estimates now show that, on average, 75-85% of the e-mail we now receive is from someone that we do not know, and 99% of that mail is discarded immediately. The problem is that the remaining 15-25% of e- mails we receive are from people we might actually want to speak to, or would like to speak to us…and we are becoming conditioned to ignore, or overlook these messages as well, and this conditioning can have some devastating effects on basic human interaction. Am I saying that Spam is the going to be the downfall of human existence? Nope. But ask yourself, how many times have you gotten an e- mail from a friend and ‘just forgot’ to reply to it until that message gets buried so far down in your in-box that it has essentially disappeared. Do this a few times, or worse, open your e-mail and see all those Spam messages and just hit the “Delete all” option without first taking the time to try and cull out the genuine messages from the junk, and you are going to realize that we’re all guilty. But what if that one message is from someone who really needs to communicate with you? Or is trying to get in touch with you about something that is important to them? Sure, they could pick up a phone…but really, you know also that we all have ‘e-mail friends’ and then we have ‘phone friends’. It is human nature to fall into patterns, and to feel comfortable in those patterns. So an ‘e-mail friend’ tends to stay as an ‘e-mail friend’ even though there are other means of communication available. So there are a few easy technological steps that you can take to avoid sending an inadvertent message to one of your ‘e-mail friends’ that you are not interested in their friendship…e-mail or otherwise. Use Spam filters. Most e-mail clients now offer some kind of filtering system for free. Find out what it is and get it set up, you will see a marked reduction in the amount of junk that you receive in your regular in-box. Use the “Follow Up or Tag” feature. This feature allows you to tag specific e-mails for follow-up at specified times. Don’t have time to answer that e-mail from E-Mail Friend Bob right now? Tag it to remind you tonight, when you do have the time. Create an automatic reply. Sure this seems cold at first, but it can let the person sending you the message know that you did receive their message and that you will answer them when you can. Usually, these types of messages can be personalized somewhat, like answering machines…so say something like “Thank you for sending me an e-mail. I can’t wait to read messages from my friends, but if this was an unsolicited e-mail, then please remove xxx@email.com from your mailing list immediately”. Set up an e-mail address that you use only for friends, and then never give that address out when you fill out forms or shop on-line. This will limit the exposure to marketers that your e-mail address has. Never answer e-mail chain letters. No one ever died or got fabulously wealthy because they did or did not answer a forwarded chain e-mail. The vast majority of these forwarded e-mails are just used to gather e-mail addresses for marketers. If you must send on a great joke to a friend, recopy the joke into a new e-mail and then send it…break the chain! None of these solutions are perfect, but they are a start. We can take control of e-mail back from the spammers and perhaps regain a little humanity in our dealings with e-mail friends. After all, no real friend ever likes to feel ignored. ------------ Email Scott Jones: rosenquill@rocketmail.com Comment on this column in the forum. Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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