Comments on: No, I will not add you to my whitelist

By: Jimminy

Jimminy — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 20:47:21 +0000

I agree with most, except for 1 and 3, as follows.

1) You don’t want your email harvested off the internet, why should companies want their email harvested? That is not realistic.

3) Blame the lawyers. Blame the courts. Blame the juries. But in a country where, if someone causes you harm by stealing your stuff, and the “system” decides that you cannot hold them responsible because you “didn’t make a significant effort” to inform them that they shouldn’t steal it, you can count on it being there. Next time you’re on a jury where someone is looking to get paid big because they got hurt robbing someone, be careful where you allow the liability to fall.

But what happens when you sign up for an account somewhere, yet the confirmation email gets caught in your spam filter because there is a line in the mail like “Your account at xyz.com” and a line like “Click to activate”. I’ve seen it happen. If you think that “most spam filters” are a decent judge of character, you are mistaken. Spammers will adopt whatever mechanism gets their crap through the most. It’s all dollars to them. Believe it or not, people actually try to buy the products - the fake pills, the enhancers, the whatever. It may only be 2%, but 2% of millions is still lots of thousands.

By: What is Spam?

What is Spam? — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 11:09:51 +0000

You can’t really expect companies to ditch the legalese in each email footer. It offers them legal protection. _You_ may not find it interesting, but it’s necessary to cover one’s ass legally.

By: Kevinpan

Kevinpan — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:46:00 +0000

I agree Air said..
The spammers is very very suck..my mailbox got about 30-50 mails ,80% is spam mail..
I have spend many time to delete them .Some time I deleted my userfull infomation.becouse I’ll it’s a spam mail..

By: air

air — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 01:00:41 +0000

I know some tech available in the market today which ask to confirm the security code after they sent out their messages, once the receivers accept the messages, this can ensure no spam messages anymore, as each and every new message require the sender’s confirmation.

By: Jon Eastwood

Jon Eastwood — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 12:11:04 +0000

I agree with Laszlo. If you are going to whitelist companies like HP the spammers are bound to fake those addresses in the from field.

By: Avor

Avor — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:39:08 +0000

Cool site!

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 14:35:41 +0000

Pinner Blinn, I was too elliptical, and I too like plain text and automatic linkification. The “clickable links” in question were to later parts of the same message: they were relative links like “#story23″. Readers could scan the headlines at the top of the message, click on one, and be jumped down to that story; at the end of the story was a “back to the top” relative link. When there are 25 stories in a single email, of which any given reader cares about five at most, this is the only way to stay sane.

And some people would subscribe to 10-15 of these things, which makes the other obvious idea, one email per story, hopeless. Nobody wants a flood of 250 emails in one day from a single vendor.

As for the X-Copyright header, Outlook ruthlessly discards all headers it doesn’t understand. A copyright notice has to be findable (not necessarily easy to find, just findable) or it’s no notice at all.

By: Marcus

Marcus — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 03:39:36 +0000

The little legalese that is at the bottom of emails isn’t necessarily meaningful anyway. Lawyers love you to include them, but really there is nothing binding you to their terms by themselves. Just because I send you an email that says “You must send me $5.00″ doesn’t mean that you really have to. Unless you have a previous contractual agreement with me, that little tag line at the bottom doesn’t stop me from doing anything. That’s not to mention the fact that unencrypted email isn’t confidential by any stretch of the imagination.

This is why financial firms (at least all I have ever dealt with) have their own online message center built into their website. The most email you get is something to the effect of “You have a new message in the *BankName* message center”.

As far as copyright, if people really want to include a copyright claim, why not add it as a header? It could be a simple “X-Copyright: 2006 - Company name. All rights reserved.” This would protect the author (if it’s even needed for plain text in the US) as well as make it as unobtrusive as possible.

By: Pinner Blinn

Pinner Blinn — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 22:12:37 +0000

Have to disagree with John Cowan about HTML mail being a “practical requirement”. Just about every email tool will make URLs clickable in plain text email. I get plain-text summary mailing from a number of vendors and am quite satisfied. Plain text rules!

By: Laszlo Marai

Laszlo Marai — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 01:56:40 +0000

Whitelisting is also pointless because if people start whitelisting big companies like HP then spammers will fake those addresses in the from field.