Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia Opening E-mails From HairyAl

Have you ever had one of those days where you start out in one direction and end up doing something entirely different? It sounds trite, but that’s what I’m doing right now. I was all ready to tell you about my experiences at the West Coast Embedded Systems Conference, the great reception Circuit Cellar always gets, and the great products I saw. Of course, I’d probably slip in a little about doing all of this in a California monsoon, having to eat six meals a day with PR people, and being virtually strip-searched to get on the plane. In fact, I started writing all about ESC longhand in a notebook at 30,000 feet on the way back.

It wasn’t writing it longhand that redirected my thoughts. It was the nagging exasperation of remembering why I don’t take my laptop on trips anymore. I used to always take my laptop when I traveled, albeit for business or vacation. Like many of you, 99% of my job these days is done through e-mail. It’s a lazy practice for sure, but I’m guilty of even e-mailing editors who are only 50 feet down the hall.

Like many of you, I have to wade through hundreds of useless, distracting, and time-consuming spam messages every time I turn on my e-mail. It’s worse when I travel. The whole world might have high-speed Internet but invariably I end up in some remote corner where people still think DSL is an abbreviation for diesel. At one time I could go directly to our server and purge all of the spam before starting my e-mail program. For the two or three good messages left, it didn’t make any difference whether I was on a high-speed DSL or dial-up connection. A few kilobytes of text download and I was good to go. Today everything is rich text and HTML and I can’t just toss a hundred messages like I used to. Now, I have to open many more e-mails just to determine whether they’re real or not. Basically, the spam senders have gotten a whole lot better at disguising their e-mails, and the people who send me real messages have gotten a whole lot dumber about differentiating theirs.

Most of my problems are business related, like contest correspondence from guys in foreign countries with Hotmail addresses, who use nondescript subject lines like, "did you get what I sent yesterday?" Give me a break.

People who don’t have a pile of e-mail don’t really comprehend the problem. In fact, I have one close friend, Dick, who needed a little help understanding. Like many people who finally get a high-speed connection, they like everyone to share in their surfing experience. All of a sudden I started getting a bunch of e-mails from Dick. He’d stop on some web site, think it was great, and send it to me. I don’t mean he sent me the link. I mean he sent me the page! He actually started pasting home pages into e-mails and sending them to me.

I called him and thanked him. I also mentioned that he didn’t have to share every new web site with me anymore because I do enough surfing myself. Unfortunately, the subtle approach didn’t get through to him. After a few more days of the barrage on my in-box, I decided to send him a few web sites to check out. I forwarded 75 spam messages to his in-box with a note that he could expect this helpful activity every day from now on. A couple hours later I got a telephone call and he said, "So I guess you don’t need me to point out any web sites?"

Dick finally got the message about sending a lot of innocuous crap, but I also had to educate him again about making his "real" e-mails not get tossed out with the spam. Obviously, because he isn’t spammed everyday, Dick didn’t realize how much his e-mails looked like spam. He’d send a dinner invitation from "Dick" (or one of a half dozen other handles) with a subject like, "Want to get together Saturday?" Sound like about a dozen solicitations you get every day too? After not replying to any of his e-mailed invitations, he called and asked if I was mad at him. Now, he puts his full name in the subject line so I don’t trash his e-mail.

Unfortunately, with all the junk e-mail I have to delete, I can miss quite a few legitimate e-mails if people don’t use some intelligence when they send messages. If you really want me to read your e-mail, I’ve come up with a few rules to save it from the trash can.

1. Make the subject something that I will recognize. Write "Have the Motorola Design Contest Winners been announced?" and not just "Anybody win yet?" If you are sending me something about a contest project or an article in the magazine, always put the project number or something about the specific issue number in the subject line.

2. Unnecessary attachments are a pain. They keep me from downloading your e-mail until I return from a trip. Besides the ever-present possibility of viruses, it’s irksome when the attachment is 50 characters of contact information embellished with a 100-KB company logo.

3. Don’t send me our complete communication history with every e-mail. If we’ve been going back and forth, I like to see the past couple of messages to remind me of the conversation, but I don’t need the previous 15 messages and answers.

4. Use a real e-mail address. I’m always suspicious of e-mail from tripleXguy or hairyAl@hotmail.com. Unfortunately, I get lots of real correspondence with address names stranger than that. It almost looks like the spammers are now using more legitimate-looking addresses than the general public. But really, would you open e-mail from hairyAl either?

Certainly there are more dos and don’ts I could add, but these are my hot buttons for today. I’m not sure we’ll ever solve the problem as long as it’s an open Internet. I don’t want spam to be used as the excuse to add restrictions. I guess I’m only complaining because I don’t have the luxury of even mediocre defenses. I can’t even use keyword filtering or I miss the reader who doesn’t take my advice and replies to this editorial with the subject line, "I get all those Viagra messages too." In the meantime, and while I wait for the world to achieve a higher level of e-mail etiquette, I’ll relish my present success. Dick isn’t junking up my in-box any longer and I haven’t missed any of his recent dinner invitations.

 

steve.ciarcia@circuitcellar.com

Published: June 2003