My recent invoice from the Katz Auction went to spam twice! Once through the spam filter of my service provider (MailRoute). Once I released it and whitelisted them, Outlook also decided it was spam. Maybe because it began "Dear Friend" and had links to other sites than Katzauction.com. If I hadn't been expecting it, I'd have classified it as a "Nigerian Prince" Special.
I recently saw an ad for M1 Garand parts. The advertiser said to send an SASE for a list. How many people today would understand that?
Yep. When you got called to the Bishop's cell (running over all of your sins in your head and repenting all of them on the way). You were handed a folded scrap of paper held together with a red seal. It was musty from the six pockets that had faithfully carried it across the fields, rivers, and seas that made up the world. Then you KNEW it was important.
I do, i do! So do so many other boys who grew up in the 80s looking at their brothers magazine stash. Every ad on the back pages said, send s.a.s.e. to receive your free... whatever.
Tell me you tried to pull off the "they're not mine, they're my brother's" line! Threw him under the bus.... nah, chartered the bus, drove it home and then threw him underneath. Both of you lost desert for a month. And after that stunt, you deserved it.
But do you understand how and why that happens ? It's often because a lot of people, at first contact, subscribe to emails from various companies and or websites. And at first they look the emails over and typically delete them. But the emails keep on coming and they soon grow tired of it. That's often when they start marking them as spam (because that's easier than taking the time to Unsubscribe- which is what you're supposed to do). And once they do that, their provider notices the emails are being marked as spam. And once a few people who use the same provider start marking such emails as spam, they notice even more and then all emails from that source, regardless of who they addressed to, are marked as spam by that provider. How do I know this ? Because I've seen it happen a dozen times, and because I've seen it happen dozens of dozens of times right here on CT. CT members, often new ones, see the options to get email alerts and so they start clicking on this thread that thread and every other thread, and specific forum sections, and suddenly they are buried in emails from CT - every single day. And that's when the process described above starts, and before ya know it, I suddenly start getting complaints, from members who want the emails and use those same email providers, that they aren't getting their emails anymore ! So I tell them to switch to a different email provider like gmail or something and as soon as they do they're getting their emails again. It only takes a few customers to start marking emails from a given source as spam before the providers notice and suddenly start blocking all emails from that source, before they are ever delivered to whoever they were addressed to. They aren't just sent to spam folders, they are simply blocked and deleted as spam and the addressee never even gets them at all.
Back in the mid-early days of desktop email, you could buy add-on programs with programmable filters, or it was built into the email program. I learned two, no three things... 1. It is really easy to make a filter rule set that is 70, even 80% accurate. And that set would be relatively small - if it's not addressed TO me, a couple of dozen common misspelled words, or the email came from AOL. 2. The accuracy of the filter drops over time - spam changes. And so I was spending a lot of time modifying the filter based on what slipped through. I would hit 90 or even 95% accuracy for a week and then it would slide. 3. I was spending more time coding filter rules than just viewing the inbox and pressing delete. Over time, I found that my redirector has a service, MailRoute. My ISP has filters. And my mail client (Outlook) has filters too. Combined they're probably 95% +/- due to the effort of a fair number of full-time mail experts. I still spend a non-trivial amount of time, reviewing email, checking spam traps, and the like. But it's definitely less time than when I was doing it myself. Very, very rarely, important emails get a false positive as spam. Most of the time, it doesn't matter. If I hadn't found this message, they probably would have canceled my bid in a month, blocked me from bidding again, and I would spend less money with them. Net-net, a wash. I firmly believe that since there's essentially no cost to send an email we'll never solve the problem. If we made it cost a cent or a nickel, spam would drop to nothing and most of us wouldn't notice the extra 10c a month in our Internet bill. Make senders pay for text messages and teenagers will wither and die on the vine.
