Slashdot Mirror
Buried in email?
Jethro73 writes "There is an article on Yahoo! about how Workers are mired in e-mail wasteland. They say employees waste an hour a day managing e-mail. This page at Cisco claims employees spend two hours per day, but cite a 15% increase in worker's productivity despite that." A few weeks ago I blew up my laptop and lost all my mail filters. When I got everything back up, I discovered that over 70% of my email is junk (compared to 25% after all my filters were in place). Filtering my mail is the only thing that makes reading my email possible. Well, that and ignoring any message complaining about Karma :)
Until you sign up for a mailinglist that automatically adds a "how to unsubscribe" section on the bottom of each message. :)
Not that it helps, even with a little note on the bottom of every message people still manage to post "How do I unsubscribe?" messages about once a week or so on even moderatly crowded mailinglists.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
True, but at least with email it is easy to skip the long winded but useless parts.
"Hi hank, this is andrea at extention 123, thanks for getting back to me on the bacon problem, I have one more question: how many cysts are accaptable in a slice?" Said aloud I waste a couple borning minutes before getting to something useful. A reply by voice mail is just as bad because I have to give a summery of the question first. In email I just replay with an answer "5", while in voice mail my reply is "Hello andrea, about your questions about the acceptable limit of cysts in bacon, 5 reasonable limit."
Of course the above example is completely made up. (A engineer who knew a female to talk to should have been your first clue.) You get the idea, voicemail is nice, but it wastes a lot of time with redundancy and boiler plate. Email has the same thing, but you an quickly skip it.
>is really that harmful. After all, how long does it take to read one
>line and click delete.
Yeah, it's quality marketing, not spam . . .
hawk, now taking his tongue back out of his cheek
Their response was to send me a URL to a form I should print out, fill out, return, and wait for my "request" to be considered.
It was a lot easier to just install list managing software on my own machine . . .
hawk
While I didn't advertise that (and didn't expect it myself at first),
when I hired secretaries while practicing law, the *bulk* of my decision
was actually made during the initial phone call inquiring about the
job. For a small law practice, the secretary's phone presense
is a make or break issue . . .
hawk
hmm, maybe 4th class, too--I think that that's the classification for books . . .
hawk
Does not mean that you have anything of intrest to say! Actualy I don't get much junk at all, most of what I get are mailing lists that I want to get.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Someone beat you to it.
I have a filter that drops any mail I am copied on instead of my name in the TO field. I tell people this. If you only want to CYA don't bother me - I won't read it. I probably won't read it anyway unless you also call me and ask me to. For all short stuff we use an IM app - usually because we're all on the phone most of the time.
well, you could still write the code! It just wouldn't do much...
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
That's not coming until the NEXT version... :)
My journal has hot
Email addresses were supposed to be the ultimate in portable commmunications - you could read your email everywhere, and you'd have it forever.
But the reality is, the longer you have an email address, the more lists it gets put on, and the more crap you get, until even the filters can't hold back the tide of crap, and you're forced to just give up and get a new address.
I've had this email address since 1995, and let me tell you, I get the craziest crap on a daily basis - probably 80% to 90% of the stuff I get is spam...
I agree. Just think how much more bonding we would have among our employees as they have to wait for each other in meeting rooms to discuss a problem, instead of just sending a email to several recipients which they all can read at their own leisure. Of course, since the points are documented in a nice compact format, the engineers and all will get to meet a second time when one forgot.
/.s that don't understand sarcasm: People have a lot of email because it is often better than discussing stuff in the halls.
For the
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
A copy of S.1618 can be read at the following address:1 618es.htm
http://www.techlawjournal.com/congress/slamspam/s
As the notice at the top says, the bill never became law, but it probably doesn't surprise anyone that the morons who try to make money fast with unsolicited commercial mail don't know any better than to copy and paste the canned paragraph you quoted!
More about this bill and why the "This message cannot be considered spam" claim is nonsense can be read at:
http://www.profitjump.com/articles/0705-spam.html
In a slowing economy, where businesses are looking for ways to cut costs and increase productivity, simply cutting out unnecessary e-mail will have an immediate impact. What a load of crap. Looks like the "research firm" Gartner is suffering from a slowing economy itself and needs a quick shot in the arm. Oi! Doesn't the preview button work anymore?
I get 100 to 200 messages a day, and usually no spam. Every one of these messages is relevant in some way to the things that I do or like. Many are the communications between myself and people I'm setting up business transactions with. I don't think that the time I spend reading and answering all of this is wasted time in the least bit. In fact, it is only because of e-mail that I'm able to handle all of this in only an hour or two. Let's imagine what my life would be like if all these contacts had to talk to me on the phone. I would basically have to sit by the phone all day to make myself available to take the calls, and also I would have to deal with constant interruptions. With e-mail, I can handle messages when I want to and actually get other work done. Without e-mail, my productivity would be approximately zero.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Non-time critical?
Hell, I love coming back from a day off, and finding the flood of messages, including the ones from my boss with the subject 'where are you', when he forgot that he granted my leave 2 days ago.
And it doesn't help when people outside my department send me the 5 'urgent' notices to go along with their first request.
Or, my favorite, people who don't understand mailing lists, and so, set up their own distribution lists in their address book, and I have a dozen messages regarding a project I'm no longer assigned to, and even when I do mail people to get them to stop mailing me about it, the next day, someone who was out the day I asked everyone to stop mailing me does a 'reply all' to three of the earlier messages (not reading the whole thread first, and then writing one message), and it starts all over again.
That's not to say that e-mail doesn't have its advantages, but people need to learn how to use it correctly, and not assume that it's a direct replacement for a memos/meetings/phone calls/etc.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Jesus Fucking Christ, I don't believe this. There is not one post yet which points out that in the corporate environment, EMAIL CLIENTS ARE TOYS NOT TOOLS.
Of course workers are getting bogged down in email. They're using Outlook for heaven's sake, or Netscape or Eudora or Notes. These products are the most unspeakably half-assed crap -- I have used all of them extensively, and know whereof I speak -- and it's impossible to manage email in them.
How do they suck? Oh, let me count the ways:
Anything which does formatting (HTML email, etc.) takes longer to render, so you have to pause for that much longer on every message. It's infintessimal on a single message, but it adds up fast when you have 100 messages a day.
The filtering on those products is unforgivably lame. To the extent they manage to filter, they then are helpless to cope with filtered mail.
Speaking of rendering time: they go to all that effort to have snazzy window-y GUIs, and then don't put the power to, say, color code on a filter basis into the hands of the user. Brilliant.
They have no flexibility of identity, which is one part of the equation of functional corporate email. It is imperative that the user be able to specify both Reply-to and From fields in his out going message. If Joe Rep is one of the several people receiving the emails sent to "moreInfo@somecompany.com", he must be able to send email From, or at least Reply-to "moreInfo@somecompany.com".
The concept of filtering as implemented in those packages is the paradigm of paper in cabinets. WHAT THE HELL? It should be possible to put one message in multiple "mailboxes", but only have one actual copy stored -- and the client should tell you where the multiple copies are, and behave sanely if you delete one.
There is no, not one, no, not any of these products with any provision, whatsoever, of the timely retirement of email into archives. Some permit something like manually saving things to archives, but none let you say "this folder, move read messages into that archive after two months". So these email clients are completely unscalable through time. After you have used one for a year, you're drowning in relics, which you want to save but are in your way. The idea that anyone would routinely throw away email is absurd. Diskspace is dirt cheap, there is no excuse. A sane method of archiving is vital -- a method which allows you to "put away" things you're not using, but take them down when they are needed again.
I could (and someday will) go on and on and on about how worthless the tools corporate users are expected to use. But it's not just the mail clients! If you want users to not spam everyone, have a viable place for them to send that info: set up lists and boards sanely, so people use them. Make it easy for people to be added or removed from lists. Have policies in place to handle contractors and temps; it is not sane to expect all important instructions to go over email lists which your temps aren't on, and expect for your temps to know what to do. Duh.
Have aliases or lists for interfacing with the public, so that outsiders don't have to know the name of the relevant person they should contact. "Sales@yourcompany.com" (for example) should go to the right group of people, and every time they respond to one of those emails, everyone else in that group should be notified. Duh.
And, Duh, their email client should prominently clue them into the fact the email they are responding to is not to them personally, but to the "sales" alias.
It all boils down to the fact that corporate email systems -- their configurations from a usability standpoint, and their god-awful clients -- are at best children's toys, not professional tools for getting real work done.
There is no product up to that description, frankly. Meanwhile, we geeks will continue using terminal-based solutions. Some swear by emacs, some by pine. Me, I have a homebrew concoction of nmh, procmail, several bzillion little shell scripts, and my own domain (so I can have all the email addresses I ever want). It's not even close to adequate, but it's so far in advance of corporate toys it's pathetic.
I know that lots of people sneer at geek's tendency to try to solve human problems with technological solutions, but DAMN, this is precisely the kind of problem to be solved technologically.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
I discovered that over 70% of my email is junk (compared to 25% after all my filters were in place). Filtering my mail is the only thing that makes reading my email possible. Well, that and ignoring any message complaining about Karma
Oh! I figured the best way to get CT's attention was to put a catchy subject line, MAKE MONEY FAST or even INSTANT SLASHDOT KARMA. And now I find the reason not one of my submissions has ever made it is because he filters out such great subject lines. Its good to know that he gets 30% legitimate emails, that tops me.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Never.
Because if they were, half the PHBs in America would be exposed for the illiterate, dr00ling cretins they are.
On voice mail, nobody knows you can't spell past the sixth grade level.
This friend, let's call him Arp, works for a company big enough that they're in at least two buildings. One day, everyone in the company got a message reading, quite simply:
And that, well, was that.
Apparently there had been a false fire alarm at one building, and in a panic the receptionist was told to have everyone ignore it. She didn't think to filter out the people who worked at a different facility & weren't aware of the alarm, and she didn't take the time to fill in the blank about what, exactly, it is that is not real.
Heh.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I got this message at the beginning of March & I'm still laughing....
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Shouldn't that be 4:20?
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
this is SO TRUE. I worked as a consultant at a company that used Voice mail like most people use EMAIL. Forwarding Voicemails, the whole nine-yards... some voice mails would be 5 or 10 minutes long! I can scan a long message, looking for the 'key' peices of info, in WAY LESS than 5 minutes.
For me, the only alternative to email would be to communicate less.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Open mail relays are how spammers manage to send out thousands of emails, not web-based free email. For some reason there never seems to be a lack of open relays.
I know there's software for this, my ISP used it once on me. The best part is that it said I had an open relay when in reality the Exchange server was already patched. I can't imagine this kind of software being very hard to write. First scan for port 25, get a list of mailservers, run a mail message through to yourself. Once your mailbox is nice and full you can read the headers and send letters to sys admins. I'm sure that part can be automated too.
Imagine if this was the download of the week at Cnet's download.com. Expect lots of network scanning and firewalls going off at first, then a quiet spam free internet.
Then again there are other ways to spread spam without open relays.
I found that the easiest way to manage e-mail is to have 3 accounts:
:-P
1. Work account-this is obvious, only give the address to people that will be contacting you for work purposes, maybe family members for emergencies.
2. Home account-at your normal ISP, give this one out to all your friends, family, etc...anyone that wants to BS about how the weather sucks or tell you about their life.
3. Junk account-this is the most important one to me. Get a Yahoo! account or something similar, that way if you get spammed it doesn't matter. Use this address to fill out forms on webpages etc. That way, if there is some e-mail newsletter you are interested in, you can have it sent to that address without interferring with work life or home life.
This may seem obvious to a lot of slashdotters, but if you are careful who you give your addresses to, there shouldn't be a spam problem. This really works, try it. Keeping track of 3 passwords...that's your problem
Someone you trust is one of us.
I can't decide which is more appealing, the lack of a subject or the reckless use of CAPS LOCK.
Somehow this email reminds me of the Southpark movie . . .
-Peter
A lot (or in slashdot-speak alot) of people are say (to paraphrase) "yeah, but without email you'd have to try to reach people on the phone or in person."
I don't think that anyone is debating the usefulness of email. OTOH, people do things (that in my opinion they shouldn't do) via email that they would NEVER do in person or via phone.
At my last job I'd say I got 40 messages a day that had NOTHING to do with work.
To: Everyone[company name withheld]
Subjects:
"Chili cookoff on Friday!" (Reminder number 12)
"Used mattress for sale."
"Marking newsletter for [today]" (that only marketing people care about. EVERY F---ING DAY!)
To: EveryoneAustin[company name withheld]
"Someone [at the building across town] left their lights on."
"Cake in the breakroom [at the building across town]"
Now, I LOVE email. But Merciful God STOP THESE PEOPLE.
Of course these people think this stuff is important, and think they are doing every one a favor. What they fail to realize is that they are wasting my valuable (slashdot) time.
Anyway, that's my rant.
-Peter
and just pay them per line of code
this has actually been done. frightening, really.
On the whole, IT definitely leverages your workforce and makes them more productive -- can you imagine how many jobs would be impossible to do without computers these days?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/18397.ht
--
--
E2 IN2 IE?
I'm watching a NasaTV stream as I'm surfing slashdot, and guess what they're doing?
They're debugging Yuri's Outlook setup. Looks like NT dropped a drive mapping to where Yuri's outlook .pst was, so it remade it's own.
Even in microgravity, email kills productivity and MS sucks. ;)
I use procmail with an accept-list and I get no spam (I define spam as UCE with a forged From header). Here's my .procmailrc.
I mean, for Cisco to trace back to when they did n't use email and use stats from those days to compare to modern day worker productivity, they're going to have to account for a lot more than just the fact that they have email now.
Look, if workers aren't communicating, there's a problem. E-mail is the least obtrusive, most efficient communications method, bar none. I have enough interruptions in my day without Instant Messaging!
Now, if the Gartner Group were to analyze the amount of time IT workers spend reading Slashdot... Ooops! Gotta run, boss is coming!
Never take a beer to a job interview.
The bill S.1618 was introduced in 1998, but didn't make it into law. There's more information on this at SpamCop.
(What's particularly silly about this is that so many of the spammers are outside the US. If, as has happened, I'm in the UK and I get spammed by a guy from the Far East who's faking an address in Latin America, how can what the US Senate might or might not have thought about it be in the least applicable?)
NEVER REPLY, at least, not to the sender. If you do, they'll keep your address on file (and possibly sell it on) because your address is suddenly more valuable for spam-- they'll know there's a real human who's reading mail sent to it. If you really want to complain, you could try mailing abuse@ their ISP: it works, sometimes.
Death to Spam is a good read on the subject. You might also like to check out the alt.spam FAQ.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
Having said that, it can be challenging to deal with a high volume of mail. If you're on Unix, implement a good filter in perl with the Mail::Audit module. Separate stuff addressed to you from lists, so you don't miss an urgent mail while drowning in list traffic. Use an efficient MUA like mutt.
I do wish very much that corporations would instill some basic mail rules in employees, like:
[1] Meaning, a document inflicted on me by others. I've printed out a few program listings and mails.
On the otherside, I'd like to say that Yahoo article was DEFINATLEY junk science.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
The asynchronous method of communicating is almost always best in business. I find that 95% of my questions for someone are not time-critical, and can be handled at the other person's convenience (say, in a day or two), and allow me to keep working without having to interrupt my task to go find the person.
Yet I hear so many people say "Oh, I get 30 messages a day!" I say "Yeah, but those are 30 communications you were going to get anyway, but now you can handle them when YOU want, without the other person having to track you down."
--
Sure, sometimes you need face time. Part of the problem is not knowing which medium to use. Roughly, the rules I use are:
- Intranet site: Information that could be widely useful, but probably not by everyone.
- Email: Simple questions that aren't time critical.
- Phone: Simple questions that are time critical, or the person is far away.
- Face-to-face: Anything involving idea or knowledge creation, or anything involving personal/personnel issues.
- Overhead paging: Only reserved for someone being on fire.
This last one is a pet peeve of mine. I'm so annoyed at how my employers for the past 10+ years have no idea how intrusive overhead paging is, and how 90% of the time it's not as time-sensitive as that sort of immediacy requires.--
Email is great because it improves communication, but some of that improvement is swallowed up by the time it takes to go through all the additional communication, and the overuse of communication because its become so easy to pass on anything you care to think of to everyone in your company. Exercising a little judgement before hitting the Send button can save a company a lot of time. Mine is going through exactly this kind of exercise at the moment and the increase in efficiency is really a "low hanging fruit" in terms of efficiency gains.
Salocin.com
But wait, there's more!
Since a lot of email gateway machines now do address checking of From: headers, newer spamming software picks (randomly, I think) an address from the list to put in the From: header.
That has three effects:
The last time this happened to me, I got over a thousand bounce messages. I immediately documented the hell out of it and reported it to my employer, going to them before they came to me.
An hour a day? Sure, if 'managing email' includes writing recipes to aunt Sally, forwarding the latest virus hoax to EVERYONE YOU KNOW, and deleting all the pr0n spam you get because you surf pr0n at the office.
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
Or you could describe a riculously impossible to implement Rube Goldberg device for karma whore points!
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
People have a lot of email because it is often better than discussing stuff in the halls.
Indeed. My managers are fighting a constant war against "hallway conversations" - well, sort of.
We still feel that hallway conversations are excellent for providing a certainl comfort level of human interaction, but we also feel that hallway conversations suck a bowl of rocks when it comes to clearly specifying and documenting project requirements or work requests.
Email and similar tools make my job possible, and save me insane amounts of time. Of course, I actually bother to optimize these tools - with filters, sorters, and an understanding that most email is unimportant and can be ignored/deleted. This approach saves me even more time, and makes me so productive that I can spend most of my workday posting long-winded rants to /.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
* if workers start to camp outside the office instead of driving each morning to work and back in the evening: no more hours wasted in the traffic jam, which can then be spend on business!
* if workers are only allowed to drink water from bottles they have to bring themselves and have to fill at home (or when they're camping outside the office, with rainwater): no more time is wasted at the coffeemachine or watercooler! Which can then be spend on business and work!
* if businesstrips and meetings weren't done face to face but using email: no more time wasted in hotels/planes/dull offices..
oh wait...
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Yup. I *always* go upstream on them. Seems to be a lot more effective.
Another thing to note. Not everyone checks the 'abuse@' address.
So send to 'sales@' as well. You can be absolutely darn tootin' certain someone's checking that one.
Oddly I learned this one in meatspace, on the phone. *Never* bother with the customer service hotline. It's understaffed and underfunded. Call the sales line and you'll find they're very eager to get you off the line so they can make some money. They can be remarkably helpful.
TomV
Email is an incredibly efficient means of communication. Senders can compose their thought without taking anyone else's time. They can multicast without getting people in the room or on the phone. All communications can be archived. Recipients can automatically file and prioritize. They can decide what to read, when to read it, when to stop reading. They can delete, file, defer. They can compose a reply to whichever points they wish, along-side the original message, all on their own time. Linux kernel developers probably get (at least) an order of magnitude more mail than the average office worker, but kernel development remains efficient.
Yet companies really do try to curtail email, all because some employees have bad email skills, which sets off the managers who have the old-school intuition that communication should be carefully channelled. This matters because, incredible as it may seem, it will probably affect you sometime. You will find yourself in a situation where there is pressure, or even a dictum, to ration email. To combat this, we must help people use email efficiently.
Unfortunately, I don't know exactly how to do this, because I think the biggest factor is psychological. People who have become comfortable with traditional business environments are used to hearing only what they need to hear. Yes--this includes techies, many of whom expect to think only about their particular domain. They become anxious or confused when they get something that doesn't directly apply to them. They need to learn that 1. skimming this email can be valuable, because they will learn more about related activities in the company, and discover unexpected ways in which they can advise or contribute; and 2. deleting or filing messages without reading them can be ok.
Has anyone seen an "email skills" approach that worked?
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
And with their usual zeal, American CEO's decide that politeness is a waste of productivity, deciding en masse that it must be rooted out to get a nice 2% more time out of their employees' workday.
---
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I have a little Perl program that does all of my filtering based on rules in a block file. Bascially, if the mail is not directly sent to me, or it's not in my block/pass list, then it gets dumped into a "potential-spam" folder (you can just send it to /dev/null if ya want.)
Here's the program: spamfilter.pl
Here's an example block file: conf/block.conf
Email me if you have any problems with it, or have questions.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
The problem with using the JunkBuster, is that spammers usually use "borrowed" SMTP servers and very rarely link themselves back to a domain.
As for fetchmail...I'm not sure...anyone?
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Email massively improves productivity.
Most middle managers spend all day emailling their friends and contracting email viruses rather than irritating the socks off the engineers in extremely long boring meetings.
Anything that takes up manager time is bound to improved productivity.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
A lot of our customer's are in Canada's Bible Belt (Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Mission -- British Columbia), and let me tell you: you haven't heard moral outrage until you've heard an offended Xtian mother complain about receiving Hot Slippery Teens in her mailbox...
Carousel is a lie!
----
We, the upper management of eSourceTec Inc., have discovered that employees have been wasting valuable time dealing with unnecessary e-mail. Here are the steps we are taking to eliminate this waste of time and energy:
1. All employees will be required to attend a series of company meetings on the subject of "Eliminating Unnecessary E-mail."
2. Following these meetings, employees will be required to attend department specific "E-Mail Task Force" meetings to come up with specific strategies for eliminating unnecessary e-mail.
3. Each day, employees will be required to send e-mail to their managers summarizing the amount and type of e-mail they have sent that day, flagging any e-mail exchanges that they feel could have been shortened or eliminated.
4. On a weekly basis, managers will have a one-on-one session with each employee in which they discuss how well e-mail strategies have been implemented, and what new strategies might be employed in the elimination of unnecessary e-mail.
We feel confident that these steps will drastically reduce the amount of time spent each day on pointless and unnecessary tasks, and lead our company into new strata of efficiency.
Regards,
D. R. Baskerville
Vice-President, Attention Allocation Resources
If you don't want my koalas, baby, don't shake my eucalyptus tree.
When reading email, I also tend to skimread first and then dig deeper for any relevant details. And I'm somewhat used to automatically filtering out anything irrelevant, like re-re-re-quoted material. What does slow me down when reading email is that it's often plagued by errors in spelling, grammar and even basic punctuation.
I'm also not terribly long-winded when I myself send out email. I make sure my spelling is correct - again, I'm fortunate in this regard as far as natural skills are concerned. I think that overall, each second extra spent when composing an email saves at least two seconds at the recipient's end.
Plenty of jobs require you to have good communications skills, and "telephone skills" are often cited as necessary when a job is advertised. I wonder when "email skills" (you could even say "written word skills"!) will receive as high a priority?
All said, the file is in text file format and is a simple list of spammer addresses, which I am sure someone could convert/import to the format needed.
The nice thing is that people send him the names of spammers. And so it is constantly updated.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
This one was never signed into law. You can read more about it at http://techlawjournal.com/telecom/81022.htm.
Also, the following interesting discussion was posted here:
I opened a piece of Spam mail this morning and got this:
Under Bill s.1618 Title III passed by the 105th U.S. Congress this mail cannot be considered Spam as long as we include contact information and removal instructions for removing you from our mailing list. To be removed from our mailing list, reply with REMOVE in the subject heading and your email address in the body, and include complete address and/or domain to be removed. <<
Have you received an email with one of these statements yet?
Let me see if I can translate it for you.
We are going to send you a ton of email whether you like it or not. Get off our backs. If you don't like it, get yourself off our lists.<<
Does that sound about right?
Well then! I guess I'd better read it. The information contained herein must be of some importance since the information has the A-OK under federal law.
Wait. Federal law?
If I remember my Saturday morning School House Rock episode correctly, for something to become a law, it has to be passed by both the House AND the Senate plus a really important person has to sign it.
It must be a law then, right? The Spammers are using it. They wouldn't lie, would they?
It would seem that enough time has passed for the president to sign the bill into law. It's been two years. We're in the 107th Congress now. I've never heard of a law allowing people to Spam me.
Hey - wait a minute. Maybe there never was a Bill S1618. I mean, it's not a law.
Darn.
There was a bill S1618 back in 1998. It passed by a 99-0 voice vote. It's called the "Anti-Slamming Amendments Act". There was even a House of Representatives equal to it, HR3888. It also passed.
The Senate version of the bill stated that S1618 was, "To amend the Communications Act of 1934 to improve the protection of consumers against `slamming' by telecommunications carriers, and for other purposes."
Hey! Wait a minute.
"Slamming"?
Is the Congress a bunch of really poor spellers...like me?
I thought this was a bill about Spamming.
Well, it is. It's just not the main push of the bill. You don't get to "Spamming" until title three. It's right in there between "Switchless Resellers" and "Miscellaneous Provisions". The Spamming section is an amendment to the amendment. There were actually four versions of bill S1618. The Spamming section didn't show up until the third incarnation. (Source: http://thomas.loc.gov )
But still, it was passed. It was passed containing the Spamming amendment so it's on the books so we all have to receive the Spam emails sent to us by people we don't even know as long as the Spammers follow S1618 Title III outlined below:
TITLE III-SPAMMING
SEC. 301. REQUIREMENTS RELATING TO TRANSMISSIONS OF UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL ELECTRONIC MAIL.
(a) INFORMATION TO BE INCLUDED IN TRANSMISSIONS- (1) IN GENERAL- A person who transmits an unsolicited commercial electronic mail message shall cause to appear in each such electronic mail message the information specified in paragraph (2). (2) COVERED INFORMATION- The following information shall appear at the beginning of the body of an unsolicited commercial electronic mail message under paragraph (1): (A) The name, physical address, electronic mail address, and telephone number of the person who initiates transmission of the message. (B) The name, physical address, electronic mail address, and telephone number of the person who created the content of the message, if different from the information under subparagraph (A). (C) A statement that further transmissions of unsolicited commercial electronic mail to the recipient by the person who initiates transmission of the message may be stopped at no cost to the recipient by sending a reply to the originating electronic mail address with the word `remove' in the subject line. (b) ROUTING INFORMATION- All Internet routing information contained within or accompanying an electronic mail message described in subsection (a) must be accurate, valid according to the prevailing standards for Internet protocols, and accurately reflect message routing. (c) EFFECTIVE DATE- The requirements in this section shall take effect 30 days after the date of enactment of this Act.
In other words, include the paragraph that started off this newsletter and offer a viable method to getting your name off of the Spammer's list. Do that, and you can Spam away because technically what you're sending cannot be considered Spam.
This sounds too bad to be true.
Great! Just great! Now I have to allow a ton of Spam to come flying through my front door and I have to read it all because the Spammers have the power of the U.S. Government behind them. It just cheeses me off. I mean...it...
Wait. What's this?
S1618 died in committee?
That means that it's null and void? It's dead? It doesn't have any power?
Oh. The Spammer never bothered to tell me that.
Never mind.
I'll just go delete that piece of mail.
(The death of S1618 in committee: Source: http://techlawjournal.com/telecom/81022.htm )
That's that. Thanks for reading.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
My whole damn day is spent emailing!
sulli
RTFJ.
Anyway, I think there is a method to successful email management:
1. use filters (server based filtering like procmail works best but use whatever you can get your hands on.)
2. clean and review your filters regularly (otherwise you will end up filtering something you wanted to keep around.)
3. do not check out the spam you get (this usually just solicits more spam.)
4. check your mail regularly (it's better to spend 5 times 5 minutes a day reading/replying then spending an hour. This will help you stay focussed.)
5. Be critical (after the 5th email with a guy, take the phone and end the discussion that way.)
6. Once a month, throw the old trash out. (Keeping your mail spools to reasonable size will improve your chances of finding relevant information in it!)
7. If you're on a mailing list you'd like to get off: unsubscribe (try it, it usually works.)
8. Be carefull who you give your email address to.
Happy mailing!
Urd.
Most employees I know would say that about 50% of the meetings they attend are unnecessary, and that only 10% of the discussions I hear in meetings demand any of my attention at all. Any dissenting opinions? No?
E-mail is a huge advantage, then, in that it gives me the power to delete memos and announcements that aren't important to me in just a few seconds, instead of having to throw away dead trees or walk in and out of useless meetings that do the same.
I say, viva la company e-mail. We'll always have to deal with useless intra-office crap, but at least with e-mail we can deal with it in the most efficient and least wasteful way possible (well, unless you're the network administrator).
Most people hide behind e-mail and voice mail.
This is an interesting statement and I really don't see how that is a reasonable statement. If someone sends an email it is FROM THEM. If it says "You are an asshole" then they are being 100% forthright and truthful. Perhaps they wouldn't say this face to face for whatever reason (which are multiple, including often saving face for the recipient), however hiding is not taking action, and conveying the information is anything but. Let me put this into a sociological context: I have a friend who is a real social butterfly, and he has particular skills that allow him to dominate conversations (Toastmasters, blah blah blah), giving him the upper hand regardless of his actual technical knowledge. It is his belief that what we're doing here (conversing via a public board) is unnatural and perverse, and it's the domain of only the lowest of people. This medium marginalizes his skills so it offends him greatly. You see to him people should only discuss things over a snifter of brandy at the local club, and anything but just isn't right.
Most office communication should be done face to face or over the phone, not e-mail. Really important issues are *always* communicated in person.
I totally, absolutely, and positively disagree. I have found by professional experience, and this isn't 100% so don't take it as an offense, that the people who have a distaste for email and like to take things "face to face" are people with limited technical skills trying to remorah off of coworkers, people who are old school and have never adapted to technology, or bullshitters. Bullshitters are the kind of people who will do anything and everything to maintain deniability (and you reference this : Perhaps just maybe people want a paper trail because of historical reality jading them for discussing this with people?). I work in the software field and the number of times that particular people have called for face to face meetings to discuss technical issues blows me away. "Uh, why did you use a critical section on line 745?" Gee, I could give you an answer in 2 minutes if I was sitting at my desk and you sent me an email, however sitting here in a conference room talking about this "important" issue regarding software I wrote months ago I can't give a valid answer. Maybe we should call in some managers and more coworkers to ensure that the time wastage is at it's peak, and then afterwards we can all file out certain that we've ACHIEVED something, when in reality we've achieved nothing.
Another interesting thing you say is that since two people in cubicle's are near each other, communications should be verbal. Guess what : That presentation you are working on might be super duper important to you, but maybe, just maybe (and you really have to step back and take a "I am not the center of the universe" perspective to see this) it isn't my top priority right now. Maybe I'm in the middle of debugging some code. Maybe I'm writing a document. By wallowing over and intruding into my work you are imposing your priorities on me. That is the purpose of emails. Got a simple question? EMAIL IT.
M$ would have gotten the joke back in 1978 . . .
There is a heaven on earth...
Mr. Ska
I slit a sheet
A sheet I slit
Mr. Ska
sneakemail does the same thing, but you dont need a domain
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
But wait:
workers spend an average of 49 minutes per day managing e-mail....34 percent of the internal business e-mail they receive is unnecessary
Um, the reporter (or maybe it's the actual Gartner people) needs to take a remedial math class. 34% times 49 minutes is 17 minutes per day, not remotely "nearly an hour". Presumably the other time spent managing e-mail is productive. I know plenty of people who waste more than 17 minutes a day smoking or chatting by the water cooler or exchanging pleasantries on the phone or reading the sports section in the men's room. What's the big deal here?
Yes, some people use e-mail really inefficiently. I think all managers should train employees two fundamental principles of e-mail etiquette:
I expect that those two guidelines alone would eliminate 90%+ of the "wasted" time.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Aw, c'mon Mr. Moderator sir, this was not a troll. Off-topic, yes. Over the heads of many readers, maybe. Not quite funny enough to get a +1 mod, maybe. But save your troll mods for the M$ apologists ;)
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
Would it be a waste of time to set up 2 mail servers in a company? One would be for internal communications and the other one for internet mail only (with a block rejecting stuff from the same company to prevent it being used for internal mail). I think this could be used to manage spam and keep internal mail from being abused as policies could be set up on the internal mail and MAPS could be used for external mail. I would vote for it. It would keep my official business box from being plugged up.
The truth shall set you free!
Having lots of mail is extremely useful on the job. For example, at my last job, my schedule would go like this:
12:00 Get to work (I have classes, so I was allowed to be late) drop my cds in my office, turn on my computer
12:15 Go on break with friends, recount last days events
12:45 Go back to office, check mail
1:15 Go on break, talk about email and office rumors
1:45 Go back to office and eat lunch
2:15 Cigarrette break
2:45 Reread mail to make sure I didn't miss anything
3:15 Look for work
3:30 Cigarrette break
3:45 Try to find a manager to get work to do
4:15 Found manager, got work
4:30 Break
4:45 Begin working
5:00 Leave unfinished work for tomorrow
5:15 Break
5:45 Relax
6:15 Read email sent today
6:45 Turn off computer
7:00 Break
7:45 Go home
If it wasn't for email, I would've had to actually work
Much of the useless email is not pesonal correspondence as much as it is a bulletin announcement. In one group I worked in we set up a news server for this type of thing. We'd subscribe to topics we needed or wanted to monitor. It eliminated hundreds of copies of email each week.
The office email systems need to provide an easy, alternate interface to allow people to set up such bulletin boards/news groups within their organization, perhaps even setting up personal or arbitrary group posting areas. It would eliminate mass mailing and message bloat that comes with forwarding.
- Sig this!
The bill was never passed by the U.S. Congress:
-- http://www.d-pendablelibrary.com/reinboldcongress. htm
More information on the bill:
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~gcaselton/spam/bill- s1618.html
Google Search
Also: DON'T REPLY TO THE SPAMMERS "REMOVE" ADDRESSES. "Remove" addresses are almost always just a drop box to confirm the validity of your email address so they know whom to spam next time.
Liberty in your lifetime
More and more, businesses are realizing the importance of the informal networks within a company (as opposed to the formal org chart.) As stated in The Cluetrain Manifesto, business is conversation, both within the company and between company and its customers. Email is the killer app for the Internet because it facilitates these conversations. Just as in real life, not all conversations are especially useful. But that's okay. You get clues about who people are and how they like to communicate, even if the substance of the message isn't on target.
I'll grant that anything can be abused, including time at the water cooler. Some email netiquette would go a long way to reducing the problem. But having said that, I think that on balance, letting people be people and communicate like people may seem to be wasting time, but it's not really. It's building a community.
True, sometimes. We used to have a corporate VP whose memos sounded worse than an impromptu Bush speech. The top (and only) MIS guy here finally printed one out, edited it with blue and red pencil for spelling, grammar, and nonsense, and posted it on his office door. He didn't know the VP was about to fly up here for a visit...
Remarkably, that VP is long gone, and the MIS guy is still here. 8-)
>>For some reason there never seems to be a lack of open relays.
I happen to agree with you. I get hit by this one spammer every tuseday for the past 2+ years. The e-mail style is always the same. What I have been doing every tuseday is tracing the e-mail to the open relay and then send an e-mail & call to the sytem operator. It's worked very well. And system operators are very friendly about this.
My question is. Is there a way that I could run a scan to find these open relays. I would love to take a segment of the internet and run the scan and issue an advisiory to the system operators. I bet I could check a few thousand IP addresses per week. Maybe I could even form a group that does different sections.
any advise is welcome
ONEPOINT
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The big guy at the top has a stupid idea. He has a PC at his desk. He sends the idea via email to his subordinates. They spawn it to the underlings beneath who do the same ,,,etc.
It finally reaches everyone in the corporation and
along the way has been BCC and re-worded numerous times. Comments like AWESOME, FANTASTIC, WE GOTT DO THIS, ad nauseum have been added via kiss-ass mode guppies and bimbo "take my body" chicklets til its 10 times its previous size.
Hours even days of productivity are wasted and the big guy or whoever thinks he has the importance to actually make a decison has even forgotten the idea and if someone brings it up he kills it as stupid. More emails are generated as a result.
The game continues for weeks with more interspersed stupid email brainfarts. Only the few souls in IT have no time to even open their mail actually do some productive work and keep the organization running. The rest of the drones are useless except to croon and curry favor with the
upperlings up the food chain.
This is part of the reason for the dotcom scenario
and why it burst and why it will be back.
Solution: Remove or render useless the PC on the desk of the upperling/s. Most useless dorks will then transfer out or quit in confusion or fear of being found out. This WILL NOT HAPPEN.
Lets talk about American High..duhhhhhh wat dat?
RC
Let's eliminate email, so that all those employees will instead spend that nearly an hour a day talking to the people they used to email!!
We've got MBA's and we're brilliant!!!
Why do those engineers think they have to communicate with each other to write code? Silly engineers. We should keystroke monitor them to see how much code they're writing per minute, and just pay them per line of code. God it's great to be a middle manager!