junk email

[mtribe@contrib.de (Mark Tribe)]

I just got yet another email petition: this one against French nuclear
testing. Along with chain letters and other urgent updates that plead the
recipient to forward the message as widely as possible, these are becoming
pretty common. Given the ease of mass-distribution, email is an ideal
medium for such "direct action" strategies.

I don't want to say that one shouldn't use email as a grass-roots political
tool, but my email box is starting to outpace my  snail mail box in terms
of the amount of junk mail it receives. I've recently started to get
unsolicited commercial announcements from sources to whom I can't trace a
connection. That's easy enough to understand: after one or two degrees of
separation, it's pretty hard to figure out how somebody got your number.
There must be lots of clever folks out there squirreling away long chains
of email addresses every time the get a mass mailing.

As it stands, I still only use filters at a fairly moderate level: to sort
out messages from mailing lists and keep copies of some outgoing messages.
There are probably many of you out there who have been in a comprehensive
filtering mode for years.  But I'm hardly a high-profile netizen. Pretty
soon even I will have to filter all my messages, scanning the In box for
cool Subject lines or curious From lines before sending them, unread, to
the Trash.

That's kind of a bummer, don't you think?


Mark Tribe