Dodgeville

One of the benefits of owning a domain (like valdodge.com) is that you can easily create individual email addresses for every company you do business with, contest you enter, or form you fill out. In the seven or so years since I started doing this, I’ve amassed over 660 unique email addresses for companies and organizations I deal with. It may sound unwieldy, but it’s quite transparent in use; all mail comes into a single mailbox and can be easily filtered. Best of all, when I receive a “special offer” from someone I don’t know, it’s easy to tell how they got my address. It’s also quite easy to simply delete an address (and thus any spam that may go with it) when it’s no longer needed.

One of the things that chaps my ass the most is companies I deal with on a regular basis that suddenly start sending me spam or “monthly newsletters” after years of being well-behaved. Into that category now falls the Toronto Star. I’m not singling the Star out for sending me spam, but for outright lying about their “opt-in” list. I started receiving contest entries and “marketing mail” from the Star about six weeks ago, and have since received five messages. That’s definitely not a lot, but it’s five more than I’ve received in all of the previous years that the Star has had my (unique to them) email address. This kind of thing usually indicates that an overzealous marketing department has decided that although I checked the “don’t email me” box a few months/years ago, surely I didn’t realize what I was doing and don’t still want to miss out on all of the fun and adventure of receiving their spam. After all, their marking crap is so much cooler and more desirable than the marketing crap I usually get.

So I logged into the account manager to see if maybe I’d “forgotten” to opt out of receiving crap from the Star. And guess what? Not only had I not “forgotten,” but they even declare right on the account manager page that I’m “not receiving” spam from them. Well, that’s news to me.

So congratulations, Toronto Star, on joining the ever-growing ranks of companies that lie to their customers for the sake of padding an eyeball count. Do you really think that pissing off your customers is a good thing? Apparently you do.

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Background: For ten years, I’ve run a mailing list of about 110 people, most of whom have been casual offline acquaintances  for a dozen years or more. Occasionally, someone’s email starts bouncing and I have to remove that person from the list.

Today, I received an email from one of the people who has been removed in the last few months, asking how to resubscribe. I sent a message to him with the requested information and received this auto-reply a few seconds later. All personally-identifying text has been changed to “YYYY”, but the message is otherwise reproduced here in its entirety:

Subject: Undelivered Mail to Mr. YYYY.

Your message was not delivered to Mr. YYYY because
the e-mail address that you have sent the message
from is not recognized as being associated with
a known correspondant of his.

IF YOU HAVE RECIEVED THIS NOTICE, YOUR MESSAGE WAS
NOT DELIVERED.

If your message is important, please telephone him as
messages from legitimate corespondents are important.

Alternately, resend it to YYYY@myprivacy.ca and follow
the instructions you recieve from the mailer.

Due to the amount of spam recieved by these accounts,
e-mail will only be accepted from addresses that have
explicitly been added to Mr. YYYY’s list of established
correspondants.

If you are an existing correspondant and have just changed
your e-mail address, please send Mr. YYYY a message from your
old account, or contact him by phone to be added to the list.

If you have been referred to Mr. YYYY by someone else, please
contact him by telephone, as thanks to spam, e-mail is not a
reliable communications method.

Thank you.

Well. So he sends me a message asking for information, but then can’t even be bothered to receive my reply? I can assure Mr. YYYY that my message wasn’t all that important to me, so I won’t be jumping through any additional hoops to deliver it. Especially since I have exchanged email with Mr. YYYY at least as far back as July 1995 and as recently as December 2006.

But the auto-response poses a larger question: is this is what the Internet has really come to? Has spam made life so miserable that it’s ruined email, the very tool that spawned it?

By rough count of my mail logs, I’ve received about 17,250 email messages in the first eight weeks this year. Of those, slightly more than half, 8750, were automatically filtered out as spam. Another 1500 were trapped in secondary spam folders, and 3500 were from various mailing lists that I’m on. That leaves about 3500 messages that made it all the way into one of my inboxes, of which only about 200 have been from legitimate personal correspondents outside of mailing lists.

So that’s a total spam volume of 8750 + 1500 + 3300 = 13,550, or 78% of all of my email, or about 240 spams every day. Yikes. But looking at it another way, automated and semi-automated filtering has handled 10,250 spams, or 75% of all of my spam, leaving me with a spam volume of 3300 messages over eight weeks. That’s fewer than 60 a day and, while still high, is a little lower than the number of daily messages on the mailing lists that I read. And I haven’t even implemented such spam-killers as greylisting.

It’s hard for me to imagine that Mr. YYYY receives much more spam than me. And it’s equally hard for me to imagine that Mr. YYYY, at least as accomplished a UNIX geek as me (and probably moreso), is unable to configure a simple scoring system like SpamAssassin to automatically filter the vast bulk of his spam. So why use the the sledgehammer of an absolute whitelist when the more delicate rubber mallet of a greylist or scoring system will do the work? Beats me. But in the end, it doesn’t hurt anyone other than Mr. YYYY.

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