In my experience, there are three kinds of e-mail users in this world: The Good, The Bad, and The Oblivious. Happily, the majority of my undeleted e-mail falls into The Good category after it has been filtered, chewed, and digested by the appropriate defensive mechanisms in the unending fight with scumbag spammers (The Bad).

For the most part, the procedural ritual of separating the 20 good messages from the 400 to 500 bad messages a day has been successful (thank you, John Gorsky). Unfortunately, being oblivious is a common trait among the general public. They are good people, mind you. It’s just that many of them just discovered e-mail, and they think everyone else has the same naive “this is fun to play with” e-mail management style. They don’t have a clue about e-mail etiquette or the disasters they can create.

I hate to say it, but my friends seem to be among the worst offenders. There are probably a lot more people whose e-mails end up deleted by my spam filter than I know about, but my friends are the ones who invariably call me to complain that I haven’t answered their last 25 chain letters or want to know what I did with all the neat web pages they uploaded to me. New users have no concept of the e-mail combat ritual that most of us go through. Even things that make it past the spam filter can be suspect. For example, I have one friend whose e-mail address just didn’t seem right:

Sender: Johnand.e@hisISP.net   Subject: Test Message  
Sent: Saturday, 02/25/06 4:44 PM   

We’re all familiar with the slimy tactics used by spammers to get through filters, so there was no way I was going to open an e-mail from such a bogus address as “johnand.e” and this ridiculous subject. Only later when John called on the phone did I understand that “johnand.e” stood for he and his wife (John and Dottie). Nevertheless, while technically correct, I warned him that business people like me would be very skeptical about anything described as a “test message,” and that he shouldn’t be surprised if most of his e-mails end up deleted. He subsequently changed it to “johnanddottie” and said he’d be more careful with the subject line.

Of course, some people are incremental when it comes to getting with the program. A couple days later, I found another message in my spam basket from “johnanddottie,” but at least this time I was a bit more confident that the e-mail wasn’t going to blow up my hard drive even if it still had a silly subject:

Sender: johnanddottie@hisISP.net          Subject: Happy Hour      Sent: Monday, 02/27/06 2:32 PM 

I opened the e-mail and was greeted with bright blue stationary with swimming dolphins and a plethora of emoticons. Somewhere in all this mess was a message discussing whether we were heading to the same restaurant that evening. Of course, when I hit Reply, I discovered my Outlook reply blue font was completely invisible on the blue stationary. Telephone time again.

Either they live in very protected environments or slow learning is endemic with my friends. Yesterday I got an e-mail from another friend. We had already been through the stupid subject and first-name-only sender-elimination drill, so he at least knew how to send a message that I’d open. Outlook showed that there was an attachment but not the size. I clicked on it anyway. I swear that they’re out to get me. I clicked and it started downloading the e-mail and attachment. Like most Microsoft stuff, oblivion and “still working” have the same screen indication. Ten minutes into sitting there staring at the stupid hourglass, I picked up the phone and called my friend. He laughed and said, “I just got a great new 8-megapixel camera, so I sent you the first 18 pictures to show you how great it is.” He didn’t hear my gasp as my questions continued. “Zip files? What are those? I just pasted it into the e-mail,” he responded. AAArgh!

Unfortunately, our e-mail server can pretty much take anything, so his 45-MB e-mail was solidly in the pipe. If I had been sitting in my office, it would have been about a 5-s Intranet download. But being offsite with a laptop was another story. I had DSL where I was, but my e-mail download speed was determined by the shared e-mail server upload speed back at the office, my share being probably 128 kbps or so. Outlook and its “busy-signal” hourglass would stay on my screen for about an hour!

While the rest of the world fortifies itself against the ever-improving ingenuity of scumbag scammers, my greatest susceptibility seems to come from the subterfuge of well-meaning but naive newbies. It’s an old cliche, but with friends like these, who needs enemies?