End of Email Marketing

I really don't know why they continue to try - not that it works with me, I guess there are some who still fall for this shit.

Yeah, GOM mode engaged (Grumpy Old Man).  

For my main email address, which is linked here and about a half million other places, I use Hotmail.  I get an average of 25 messages a day that make it through the 38 rules I have that automatically delete messages with certain words in them.  I don't get all, obviously, but certain key phrases tend to trigger the nuking, which is fine by me.  If you include the phrase business proposal, yep, right out the window.  Sure, I may have missed a quarter million or so promises from people who had no intention of following through on their commitments, not that they made any, but you know what I mean.A

I cannot even begin to estimate the number of utterly inappropriate offers that some allegedly young women have made to me, but as I've got no intention of following through with any of them, what difference does it make.  

I do think, however, that there should be a few things built into the whole internet email system which could help reduce this crap.  For example, if the destination before the @ symbol is more than 24 letters without any punctuation at all, the message needs to be dropped.  I also think that if the message comes from a server, the message header should include the actual account and IP address which sent it.  If the IP is somehow traced back to a public, open network, then the message should be dropped.  If you can't get a Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo account by now, well, bugger off, you're not trying hard enough.

And if the message provides links or other direction to another web site, the email transfer agent should be smart enough by now to check the contents.  If the message is pulling images from one site, directing you to another site, being sent by a third, and the same message is being sent to more than a dozen addresses, well, then, no.  Trash it.  

But I guess I'm GOM incarnate.  I remember the good old days when email held the potential promise of reducing the garbage that assaulted me daily.  So be it. I do spend about five minutes a day in my spam folder, blocking most of the message senders who get to that point.  Because I really admire the ingenuity that gets people far enough to piss me off, and the blocking is one of the few things I have left which I can do.  I do think that if a large amount of spam comes from a particular domain, ALL of the email coming from that domain should go through a filter, and messages which are spam should be returned to that server.  If it causes the server to fail, well, maybe they should do something about the level of garbage being generated.

But what the heck do I know.  I'm just a GOM. 

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