Today I sent a message to student, thanking her for sending me some money up front and agreeing to review the piece of work she’d suggested as her first offering.
It bounced!
I wrote a very simple note, in case something in the original had triggered a hypersensitive ’spam filter’, and tried again.
That bounced too.
This isn’t the first time I’ve had problems sending mail to people with a ‘comcast’ e-dress, but it’s damned infuriating when you can’t even send them a short note to say there’s a problem. Others sometimes bounce my mail, but comcast quite regularly - but, as far as I can tell, quite inconsistently - treat my mail the way The Harlem Globetrotters would treat any unattended basketball. They bounce the crap out of it just to show off. I know filters are robotic, but after a few years of being permitted and then blocked according to some electronic whim it begins to feel personal.
Also, once upon a time - in the honeymoon period of the internet - ISPs routinely let the would-be recipient know that incoming mail had been blocked, but, ‘in the interest of efficiency’ this seems to have been abandoned over the last few years.
It fascinates me though how even the most obvious and universally reviled spam, aimed at millions of unwilling recipients, still gets through, whilst my simple little notes to people obviously present a far greater threat. Unless… No, how could I be so cynical? Unless I’m just an easier target. But that would suggest some human intervention rather than a mindless robot, so I can’t really believe that.
I do appreciate that huge swathes of bandwidth are gobbled up every hour of every day by pro-spammers. I do realise that there are problems dealing with international spamming. But I am not one of that shadowy crew. I’m just a poor bewildered author who would rather be teaching and sharing my love of the written and spoken word instead of having to wrestle with mindless robots in other countries.
I don’t think for one minute I’m the only writer with a website - and a small related business - who doesn’t really understand what goes on ‘under the bonnet/hood. I only drive the thing, I’m not a mechanic.
Hopefully my ‘Tame Geek’ will be in touch soon and sort things out for me so I can get back to doing what I do best. I’d much rather help than rant.
Computers and the Internet are amazing beasts, but there are times when typewriters, envelopes and stamps would be far more convenient and reliable.
You may wonder if I get any spam myself. Very little is the answer. Some of this is because I don’t blindly click everything in sight, because I don’t jump at every (or indeed any) damned pop-up telling me I’ve won the ‘hourly prize of umpteeen million dollars plus a set of matching Samsonite cases to carry it away, and probably a set of damned diamond earrings as well if I send only $3-99 as a handling fee, nor do I hang out at many ‘dubious sites’.
Also I have ‘Mailwasher’ fighting my corner for me. That’s how filltering should be done, at the user’s end. It’s easy enough to train it to pick out the obvious junk and delete it from the server, still giving you the option of picking up mail from any friends who are daft enough to put “You have won a million dollars’, or similar, in the Subject line.
You know something - and this is absolutely true - I still had dark hair when I started on the web, not a trace of grey, and it wasn’t that long ago, even if it was in the last century. My photograph now tells a very different story…
John