Out of the way

I have had 5 email accounts which I have given out as my primary address, in the 22 years that I have had email. (Sadly, only the last 3 still work - a terrible example of breaking URIs caused by short-term thinking in systems setup). In that time I guess I have received millions of messages - since I got between 500 and 1000 per day for the last decade it seems a reasonable guess. I have written thousands, too.

For the last few years Opera has been my primary spam filter. Like many people whose email comes with their job there is a filter applied before it gets near my mailbox, but I have always asked for the filter to be as liberal as possible - i.e. let more stuff through.

The first thing I do most days is get my email, check the spam filter for things that should not be there, and then check the mail for things that should be noted as spam. I generally get about 1 false positive (something marked as spam that isn't) and a dozen or two false negatives (things not marked as spam that are). What surprises me is the times that I pick up something that looks for all the world like spam, and for some reason I look at it anyway. About three quarters of the time it turns out to be important mail, but I cannot tell why I decided to look at it since it looks for all the world like rubbish.

Most recently this has happened with a series of emails about a conference presentation I am giving on using IT in business. Blank subjects, unrecognisable addresses, mislabelled languages and character sets, all-caps sentences, a raft of things that normally look like spam. But it happens in almost every field I am involved in.

It is terrible that we have to adjust what we do to suit the computer. But the time has probably come that learning work skills should involve learning how to write mail that does not look like spam to a spam filter. It isn't really about the computer though, it is about learning to work around other people - the people who write spam in the first place, polluting networks with vast amounts of rubbish. Networks cost money to build and maintain and use, and a disturbing proportion of that money is spent on stuff that people actively want to avoid because it stops them being able to work effectively or enjoy themselves.

People who haven't learned the language of email appear to be poorly educated. I think in an age where email is really critical, that is because they have been poorly educated. Writing a mail that will get caught by any spam trap (and many people will look at and say "that looks like spam to me" is sort of like ringing a business contact from a public phone, not introducing yourself, and saying "call me back on my private line" then hanging up. It might work, and it might be reasonable. But it is generally pretty unhelpful at best.