Tag Archives: email

On Mailing Lists

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Talk about junk e-mail!

Whew! I just unsubscribed myself to the last e-mail list I was subscribed to.

An e-mail list, if you’re not familiar with the term, is like a topic based mailbox that list subscribers can send messages to. When you send a message to the list, it’s automatically sent in e-mail to everyone on the list. The idea is that you can use a list to get information about a topic from people who might have answers.

The operative word here is “might.” A lot of times, subscribers won’t have an answer but they won’t hestitate to say “I don’t know the answer but wish I did” or “this might be the answer” or “that question is off-topic” or “you should ask that question in this other list, too” or “I just read the answer to that in this other list” or “why the hell do you want to know that?” Then the topic starts expanding in every direction, sprouting more questions and answers, only some of which are vaguely related to the original. Arguments develop with differences of opinion sometimes getting nasty. So one question can generate dozens of e-mail messages that may or may not have any value to the questioner. And if you didn’t ask the question in the first place and don’t care about the answer, it’s even more junk to wade through.

Of course, you can always take a list in “digest” format. That’s when they put a whole day’s worth of messages into one big, fat e-mail. I think it’s worse because you can’t even use a message’s subject line to determine whether it’s something you want to read (or delete).

One of the mail lists I was subscribed to didn’t have a specific topic. It was a strangely quiet list, with no messages for days on end. Once, I thought I’d unsubscribed to it — it was that dead. Then, suddenly, someone would send a message and twenty people would respond to it. Like they were all lurking out there, waiting for someone to make the first move so they could join in the fray.

The really weird thing to me is the amount of time that passes between the original message and the responses. Sometimes it’s as litle as a few minutes! Even in the middle of the night! Like people are sitting at their computer, watching every e-mail delivery, ready to dive in with a response when a message appears. Egads! Get a life!

Another list I belonged to briefly prevented me from posting questions or answers. Even though I was a subscriber, my messages were considered spam. Wow. Hard not to take that personally. I think I lasted about a week. Very frustrating when every time you try to chip in with a little assistance your message gets bounced back at you with a spammer accusation.

Why did I join these lists in the first place? Well, for a while I was feeling a bit isolated. I live in my own little world here in Wickenburg, one that’s very light on high-tech people. Very light. Lighter than the hot air the local “computer experts” spout while they’re pretending to their customers that they know what they’re talking about. I started feeling as if I were missing out on new developments in computer technology. That I lacked a reliable forum for getting answers to computer-related questions. That I had no place to turn to when I needed help.

I heard about a list from a friend and got mildly interested. When one of my editors praised it, I thought I was missing out on something really valuable. I jumped in. With both feet. And the barrage of e-mail began.

I’ve made worse mistakes. But not many lately.

So now I’m off the lists. All of them. My mailboxes are feeling much lighter these days.

I’m back to doing what I’ve been doing for the past few years. When I have a question, I hop on the Web and Google to get the answer.

E-Mail Addresses on Web Sites

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Why you shouldn’t include a link to your e-mail address on your Web site.

Many people — including me! — use their Web sites as a kind of global calling card, a way to share information about themselves or their companies with others all over the world. It’s common to want to share your contact information with site visitors — particularly potential customers — so they can contact you. This is often done through the use of a mailto tag. For example, e-mail me! which appears as a clickable e-mail link.

Unfortunately there are people out there who want your e-mail address, people who want to scam you into sending money to Nigeria, advertise their online casinos, sell you prescription drugs, show you their porn sites — the list goes on and on. If you have your e-mail address on any Web site, you probably already get a lot of this spam. That’s because of computer programs that crawl through Web sites and harvest e-mail addresses that are included in the otherwise innocent mailto tag. Heck, they even harvest addresses that aren’t part of a mailto tag, so just including your e-mail address on a Web page without a link can get you on a bulk e-mail list.

So what’s the solution? There are a few.

One popular and easy-to-implement solution is to turn your e-mail address into a text phrase that a site visitor must see and manually type in to use. For example, me@domain.com becomes me at domain dot com or meATdomainDOTcom. You get the idea. Someone who wanted to send you an e-mail message, would be able to figure that out — if he couldn’t, he really shouldn’t be surfing the ‘Net anyway — and manually enter the correct translation in his e-mail program. But e-mail harvesters supposedly can’t figure this out (which I find hard to believe) so the e-mail address isn’t harvested.

Another solution is to use an e-mail obfuscation program. These programs take e-mail addresses and change or insert characters to make them impossible to read. The e-mail addresses look okay on the site — to a person viewing them — and work fine in a mailto link — when used from the Web site. WordPress plugins are available to do this. I don’t use any of them, so I can’t comment on how well they work. But they must be at least a little helpful if they’re available. You can find a few here, on the WordPress Codex.

The solution I use is form-based e-mail. I created a Contact Form with fields for the site visitor to fill out. When the form is submitted, a program processes it and sends it to my e-mail address. Because that address is not on the Web page that includes the form — or on any other Web page, for that matter — e-mail harvesters cannot see it. As a result, I’m able to provide a means of contacting me via e-mail that keeps my e-mail address safe from spammers.

The program I use is called NateMail from MindPalette Software. it’s a free PHP tool that’s easy to install and configure. But what I like best about it is that you can set it up with multiple e-mail addresses. Use a corresponding drop-down list in your form to allow the site visitor to choose the person the e-mail should go to. NateMail directs the message to the correct person. You can see this in action on my other WordPress-based site, wickenburg-az.com, in its Contact Form. If you want a few more features, such as the ability to attach files to an e-mail message, MindPalette offers ProcessForm for only $15.

Other WordPress users are likely to have their own favorite methods of protecting their e-mail addresses from spammers. With luck, a few of them who read this will share their thoughts in the Comments for this post.

One more thing…this doesn’t just apply to WordPress-based sites. It applies to all Web sites. And a contact form tool like NateMail will work with any PHP-compatible Web server.

If you’re already getting spam, using one of these methods won’t stop it. It’ll just keep the situation from getting much worse. Your best bet is to change your e-mail address and protect the new one. In my case, that’s a big pain in the butt — so many people I need to be in touch with have my e-mail address and, worse yet, I often use it as a login for Web sites I visit (which does indeed make the spam situation worse). I’m working on a plan to phase out the bad addresses and replace them with ones that I protect. Until then, I have to rely on the spam-catching features of my ISP and my e-mail software to sort out the bad stuff — currently about 20-40 messages a day — so I don’t have to.

AmazonConnect

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I officially become an AmazonConnect Author.

If you regularly read these blogs, you may recall my rant against Amazon.com a few months ago. I was POed because Amazon offers free “Super Saver” shipping but, when you choose it, they delay your order. In my case, they tried to delay it for two months. Then, when I complained, they sent half my order and never sent the rest. The incident convinced me to switch to BN.com for my book buying needs. Their free shipping orders are shipped promptly and in full.

Unfortunately (or in some cases, fortunately), BN.com’s Web site lacks many of the features of Amazon.com.

Unfortunately, it lacks a decent Wish list feature. On BN.com, your wish list is yours alone and can’t be shared with others. How idiotic is that? My Amazon.com Wish List, however, can be shared with a link on a Web page or by e-mail. What better way to ensure that I get what I want for Christmas or my birthday each year?

Fortunately, BN.com lacks all the marketing junk that Amazon.com is constantly throwing at shoppers. I’m talking about recommendations, member lists, “the page you made,” and “also bought” lists. Sheesh. When are those guys going to give it up already? What really irks me is how often I connect and get a recommendation for a book that directly competes with one of mine.

The other day, I logged in to look up the availability of a book I heard about on NPR. Amazon recognized me immediately from one of the cookies it had stored in my computer. And it displayed what it calls a “plog” with a series of blog posts from a woman I’d never heard of. Turns out, this woman is an author and she evidently wrote a book that Amazon.com thinks I bought. (I don’t recall buying the book; it’s about new age healing and I don’t believe in most of that stuff.) The blog entries were of a “here’s what’s new” and “here’s how you can learn more about my books” nature — marketing through and through. I found the link sequence to make them go away.

There was also a link on my page that invited me to be one of the blogging authors. I guess they matched my name with names in their book database. (Enough to recognize me as an author, but not enough to stop recommending competing books. Oh, well.) I followed a bunch of links and got myself registered as an author with my own AmazonConnect blog.

i’m not sure how this works. It seems to me that if I write a blog entry, it might appear on pages for everyone who has purchased one of my books. Now although Amazon.com lists 68 titles for me, I only claimed about 10 as mine — no sense doing virtual paperwork for out-of-print titles. So I think that if you bought one of those 10 books and connected to your Amazon.com account, you might just see a blog entry from me.

Anyone out there qualified to try this? If you bought one of my books on Amazon.com, do try logging in to see if they push some of my prose at you. Then report back here, please, and use the Comments link to let us know.

Now this means I need to contribute to yet another blog. Just when I thought that I’d combine a bunch of my sites to reduce my blogging workload, there’s another blog to write for. But don’t worry — I won’t write nearly as much or as often there as I do here. And I won’t fill it with marketing bull.

There’s enough of that on Amazon without me adding to it.

On Cell Phones

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I think a lot of valid arguments can be made that cell phones are out of control. It’s gotten to the point that everyone seems to have one.

Or maybe I should say at least one. I had a real estate agent last year who carried two of them and a pager.

Is anyone really that important?

No matter where you go, you see someone with his cell phone pasted to the side of his head blabbing away, often oblivious to what’s going on around him. Or even funnier: apparently blabbing away to himself because he’s wearing some kind of fancy Bluetooth earpiece that looks suspiciously like communications head gear from the orginal Star Trek.

Do these people really need to be talking while they’re shopping for groceries, standing on line in the post office, crossing the street or — dare I say it — piloting their car through a crowded parking lot?

Does everyone need a cell phone? Even kids have them now. Heck, when I was a kid, it was a real treat to have an extension of the house phone in my bedroom. I didn’t have my own phone number, a number that would reach me any time of the day or night wherever I was.

Am I jealous of today’s kids and their cellphones? Hell, no! What’s so good about being reachable anywhere you are when you’re a teenager out goofing off with your friends?

I do, of course, have a cell phone. It’s for business — and I’m not just saying that. I set up my office phone number so I can forward it to my cell phone when I’m not at the office. People call that published number and reach me. I’ve booked more than a few helicopter flights on that phone.

And I do use the phone when I need information or need to tell someone something. Going to be late for an appointment? I call. Can’t find the street I’m supposed to turn on? I call. Need to know if we have any plans for next Tuesday night? I call. According to my phone bill, more than 80% of the calls I make last less than a minute.

The important word here is need. I use my cell phone when I need to. I don’t use it for idle chatter. There’s two reasons for that. First, I like to be comfortable when I’m chatting with a friend or family member. So I usually do it from home. Second, lengthy chats wear down the phone’s battery. A dead cell phone won’t meet my communication needs.

And no, I won’t buy the second battery pack. Or the colorful face plate or case. Or latest ring tone.

What’s with the ring tone thing anyway? I think that’s the most obnoxious part of cell phone usage.

We’ve all experienced this: You’re sitting in a restaurant with a friend/spouse/family, having a nice dinner, when the cell phone the idiot at the table behind you owns starts playing the cha-cha or the opening bars of a Def Leppard track or some digitized sound effect that sounds like a primal scream. He thinks its funny. Do you?

I don’t. I think it’s a selfish attempt to get attention at the expense of the people around him.

I read somewhere recently that people have no qualms about plunking down $10 for a ring tone but they hesitate when it comes to buying a new CD. (If anyone out there can find that piece online, please use the Comments link to share the URL; I can’t find it.)

My phone, a 1-1/2 year old Motorola flip phone, has a vibrate mode. Since I wear it on my belt, I feel it when it rings. If I don’t pick it up after a few moments, it plays a sound that’s kind of like a doorbell. A simple little chime. I’m not saying its not obnoxious — any sound a device makes in a public place is obnoxious — but it’s far less offensive than some. And frankly, every time I hear it in a public place and someone looks at me, I’m embarrassed. I don’t want to be seen as one of them. (And we all know who they are.)

Mike’s got one of those Razr phones. He says people are envious of him. The phone is extremely thin, has a built-in camera and e-mail features, and does more than my original computer did. (I’m sure it has more processing power, too.) But come on guys — it’s a phone. A phone.

I’d still have my original Motorola flip phone if it would work as well as the newer one. I liked it better. It was simpler and started up quicker. It was plain black and it didn’t have a color screen. It didn’t have to make a sound when you turned it on or shut it off. And it didn’t have a built-in camera, Internet capabilities, Bluetooth, and dozens of ring tones to choose from. It was a simple, small, easy to use phone. Like the original Princess phones. Although it no longer is connected to any network, it’ll still work for 911 calls. So I keep it and its car power adapter in my car, just in case I need to make that emergency call and my other phone is dead.

That’s what cell phones were originally for, isn’t it? Emergencies?

Anyway, what started this whole rampage about cell phones was an article I read on Slate.com about fiction where the cell phone becomes the villain. It’s called “Can You Fear Me Now? – The cell phone goes from annoying to evil” and it’s by Bryan Curtis.

Some of the stories aren’t that farfetched, either.