deja vu

[cellio]

In the early days, email was unreliable and slow. We had to route messages by hand, and each machine in the network might process its UUCP queue only once or twice a day. It could take days for a message to get to its recipient, and sometimes it didn't get there at all.

Then, the ARPANet became dominant and email was faster and more reliable. Most people using it were "practicioners" of various sorts; the average guy on the street didn't yet have email.

Then two things happened: spam, and widespread email access (making spam even more profitable). Now, almost 10 years after the green-card lawyers created the first piece of spam and AOL sent out its first mass (physical) mailing of software, we're all swimming in spam, and virii, and lures (for the unsuspecting) to "just click here", and the attendant side effects. So we have filters and auto-processing of various sorts, and this month most of us aren't inspecting bounced-message reports because of all the SoBig-generated false ones, so we don't even know if we're seeing all our mail or if the mail we send gets through. Sometimes we have to send messages several times, or actually tell someone "I sent you email", before the recipient actually sees it.

25 years after the rise of UUCP, email is unreliable and slow again. Oops.

Comments

Not having problems

[laid.livejournal.com]

The only filtering I run is checking the body of messages for "TVqQAA", which is the base64 encoding of the first few bytes of the .exe header. This stops just about all the trojan email. Ohh, I also have a filter in place for things that get sent to similar usernames on adelphia.net, and things that get sent to me@buf.adelphia.net.

Combined with the heavy handed method I use to deal with spammers and their providers(forwarding the spam that I recieved to everyone at the institution from the president to the stable boy), I have very little spam to deal with.

Email...

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

Interestingly enough, there was an article in CIO magazine last year about companies who had gone almost entirely to email going back to voicemail and (gasp!) phone calls because their email was so junky. Sigh.

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

'Most people using it were "practicioners" of various sorts; the average guy on the street didn't yet have email.'

I apologize in advance, this is going to come out snarky to some folks no matter how I say it.

Most folks had a .edu account. And then when Compuserve et al started up, the academics grumbled that the bar had been lowered and now just anybody without any sort of technical background could communicate over long distances to everybody without racking up a huge phone bill to which all the ham radio operators I know were saying "That's what *we* said about Usenet!" :D