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Originally Posted by Ron Bennett
You're not the only one who is fed up with the state of email these days.
Many people say filtering is the answer, but I've known many people lose email that way due to false positives.
Proprietary web-based communication systems are definitely the way to go ... they greatly lighten the load and add accountability - one can see if their message is read or not, is more secure, and most of all throws up roadblocks that deters all, but the most determined, spammers.
* On a side note, the more widely deployed a web-based communication system is, the more vulnerable it is to being exploited by spammers - so I wouldn't suggest calling it spam-free ... but rather tout its features, such as less spam, more security, etc.
Email is more and more becoming a notification system (ie. acct signups, order receipts, news letters, etc) as opposed to a full-fledged two-way communications medium.
Many people I know rarely send email and furthermore change email accounts all the time when the spam level gets too high and/or for more privacy.
Ron
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Yep, exactly. Everyone has a spam soultion. Hell, Baracudda Networks sells appliance like things that sit between your mail server and the real world and it only costs about $10K for the largest one, plus several thousand a year to keep its "spam definitions" updated. Supposedly, its very effective. Software constantly needs tweaked and tunned, and like you said, plenty of false positives so you loose legit mail and some spam always still manages to sneak in. You can burn though a shitload of money trying to kill spam and still not be any (or much) better than when you started off on your crusade.
I am to the point where I am just saying "fuck it". People have preserved the whole "
[email protected]" method of operation far too long, well past its usefulness. To me, a communication medium is no longer useful if 99.99% of the stuff that comes through it is junk. Just think, if your phone rang 1.5 million times in a month and only 2,000 times it was someone that you wanted to talk to, you'd get rid of your phone.
The problem that I face with this is no one wants to go back to the web and check and see if someone responded to thier little message. And when every site goes to something like this, who wants to spend thier day running around to various different sites checking to see if they got a response. So in that sense, I pretty much have to add legacy support to send replies back to the ticket submitter via e-mail.
E-mail is convienent in one limited respect, but inconvient in all others, but that one little aspect of e-mail keeps so many end users holding on for dear life it isnt even funny.