RIVER BENDER - April, 2009

Are you a spammer?

A lot of my friends apparently don't know it but they're spammers if spam is defined as unwanted e-mail. I'm talking about messages I receive with CCs to long lists of people I don't know. The senders would be shocked if they knew I deleted most of their mail and I never reply. I wonder if anybody else does? I guess somebody does, otherwise the sender would probably realize that nobody cared for his stuff and stop sending it.

Spam time

Interesting that I can expect a daily dose of spam every evening from the same folks. I can see them looking over their mail and picking out interesting spam to forward to me and others. A lot of the stuff I've seen over and over. I wonder how come they missed seeing it on the first round? Perhaps it's like a telephone that some people use for outgoing calls only and never bother answering.

Don't you just love spam sent to you BCC? Since it was sent to "undisclosed recipients" you have no idea who got it besides you so you feel guilty if you don't reply to keep from hurting their feelings. I hate that feeling. I'd really prefer to be removed from the list but I'm afraid of breaking up a friendship. One friend, however, kept sending 20 of us inspiring religious stuff day after day. I didn't have time to read it and finally told him I was swamped with e-mail (true) and asked to be removed from his list. To my surprise he apologized and removed me. Nice guy.

E-mail Lists

An E-mail list is a different animal. Here you asked to be on the list and there's no way all the mail you receive will be acceptable. A poll taken on RBmail showed that 55% of the members wanted discussions of politics and religion banned. Right away you can see a problem with list mail. I don't believe in censorship so the best thing to do is get off the list or use one of several ways to preview mail before downloading and delete what you don't want. Mailwasher (www.mailwasher.net) is what I've used for years. You can also use webmail or Yahoo.

Big Attachments

Sending large attachments to an e-mail list that has slow-speed dial-up members is a no-no, especially videos that are many megabytes. It takes over two minutes for a dial-up member to download one megabyte so if you send a video that's 8 MB it will tie up his computer for over 16 minutes. He's not going to be a happy camper if he really wanted to see his family mail. By the way, never forward a video file (.wmv). Google the file name and you'll usually find the same video on YouTube. Send the web site address instead and the recipients can then decide for themselves if and when to watch your video. On attaching photos, all I can say is use Photo Resizer available on the NBCUG web page at http://www.nbcug.com/links.htm. I've mentioned this many times but big photos just keep coming anyway, some that you have to scroll to see.