It is official, email is broken. A US based security company estimates that 9 out of 10 emails are spam. That is globally. 90% of email traffic is now inducements to buy junk stock, restore your hair or participate in more lascivious activities…
If you hadn’t realized that it had come to this, if clearing your work (or home) inbox wasn’t a tedious chore that you looked forward to with the same sense of apprehension that a child with a sweet tooth anticipates a trip to their friendly dentist, then you are either a) some sort of masochist, b) in desperate need of some real friends to write to, or c) will read this post and say, “eh?”.
This does have significant repurcussions for communicators. Within government, we are protected from this by SEEMail, the Secure Electronic Environment. But if you are wanting to communicate outside this environment, then you have to accept the fact that your messages will — should you choose email as one of the channels — be just a tiny part of this wave of sludge.
My agency doesn’t do a lot of communicating with the general public, so we haven’t been forced to reconsider our channel strategy. But I would be interested to hear what those of you in the social agencies, for example, are doing to manage (what appears to me to be) the rapid decline of the sustainability and viability of this channel.
At home, I installed Thunderbird a couple of years back and have ‘trained’ it to the point where it sends 90% of the spam straight to my ‘deleted items’ folder and flags the rest as potential. It is fantastic. Anyone else have any tips on beating the evil spam overlords?
4 Comments
to avoid this issue i use dummy addresses put up in public, and ensure the provider of the address fields anti-spam software gratis.
who ever thought microsoft hotmail would be so useful?
i then use select email addresses for corresponding with friends/family etc. i also keep my work email for work only. mostly.
seems to work.
Thanks Che,
A good tactic. The very existence of the tactic, however, reinforces the point that what was once a useful communication channel is now something that requires an inordinate amount of management - at the personal and professional level.
Good to hear Hotmail is still around and good for something. I have had Gmail recommended for its spam filtering, but the page load is a killer.
hmmm. after reading this post i read the one above about alternatives to email.
good points. except that my experience of IM is “people notice you’re home and pester you for conversation”. i suppose a system that has, ‘currently engaged’, or ‘why aren’t you phoning me or walking over here’ would be terrific.
There is a guy I work with here who has a two-sided sign on his desk. On one side it says ‘Busy’ and the reverse reads ‘Out’…