2011-03-12
Trust betrayed: a story of modern email
Recently, I was in the market for some moving supplies. I found an Internet supplier with good rates and made an order. Being an Internet place they wanted an email address, so I gave them one. Of course when I filled in their forms I made sure to unselect (and not select) any tick-box that said 'please send me promotional offers etc etc'. They shipped my stuff, I was happy, that was it.
Of course, you can guess what showed up in my email recently; a special promotion offer (for something completely unrelated to what I ordered and for which I have no interest and no use). It had unsubscribe instructions; since this was legitimate company, I gritted my teeth and followed them. Well, tried to follow them, because the attempt to reach their unsubscribe address bounced with 'no such subdomain'.
There's nothing special about my story. It's happened to everyone, sooner or later, and it is one of the fundamental reasons why modern email sucks. These days, giving people your email address involves extending trust to them, trust that they will not misuse the information that they've been given. And relatively frequently, that trust is betrayed. Is it any wonder that a lot of people are moving away from email when they can?
(There's probably not anything special about the company either, but I still can't recommend uline.ca as a source for, well, anything. In fact I have to recommend against them, and do use an expendable email address in all communications with them.)
You can work in an environment where trust is routinely betrayed. You can take precautions, such as giving companies unique expendable email addresses and then canceling them when your trust is betrayed (as I did in this case). But this is fundamentally a workaround, not a solution, no matter how easy you make it on a technical level, because working in an environment of betrayal is fundamentally draining and not something that people like.
(I believe that this is the fundamental reason that various services for expendable email addresses have never caught on widely. People simply don't want to do things in an environment of betrayal; they would rather leave entirely.)
2011-03-02
Filtering, email, and differences from Usenet
Yesterday I told the story of how and why I started filtering Usenet and suggested that the same evolution applied (or would apply) to email. Well, maybe. Today it's time for a counter-argument:
Email is fundamentally different from Usenet in one core way. For the most part (and definitely if you were not a frequent poster), Usenet was simply free-floating information going by. Some of it could be useful and some of it could be interesting, but none of it was essential and none of it was specifically for you.
Email is not like that. Or rather, some email is not like that. Some email certainly is like that; it is the same sort of general free-floating information and notification and whatnot, where it doesn't really matter whether or not you read it. But unlike Usenet, some of the email you get is specifically intended for you and is in fact actively important. It is not just useful to read that email, you need to read it.
You may or may not care if your spam filters take out some of the interesting free-floating information email (it depends on how far along the Usenet evolution you are). But you definitely will care if your spam filters take out email that you need to read, because reading only some of that email is not good enough. This means that you can never have the sort of aggressive, throw away almost everything filtering on email that people wound up with on Usenet.
Or to summarize pithily: on Usenet it was acceptable to throw away some of the baby along with the bathwater because it wasn't your baby. In email, it is your baby and throwing any bit of it is not acceptable.
(Well, okay, you could see such aggressive filtering on email if email became Usenet-like, ie if people stopped getting this sort of important stuff by email, leaving only the Usenet-like stuff. I tend to think that this would be a net loss.)