January 10th, 2011, 3 Comments »
It’s a very difficult–possibly impossible–question to answer, but it’s a fun thought experiment. Putting aside automated and spam messages, what person’s email address receives the most unique email messages?
I was discussing the possibilities with a couple of people. Suggestions included President Obama, Bill Gates, Donald Trump or the business editor at The New York Times. Other, less plausible candidates included Santa Claus and Jesus. Who else?
Here’s one unscientific data point to consider:
That’s for Google.com. For the sake of comparison, here’s Google.co.uk:
Sky is a broadcaster in the UK, vaguely equivalent in reach (and maybe in politics and intellectual rigour?) to Fox News.
Who do you think receives the most email?
3 Comments »
November 16th, 2010, 7 Comments »
I’m reading Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff at the moment, and was reminded of the everyday waste that is junk mail. The amount of junk mail we create is staggering. I couldn’t find any well-cited facts for Canada, but the average American household receives 848 pieces of unwanted commercial mail a year. That’s more than a billion pieces of junk mail a year.
I finally got around to creating a little sign that enables us to opt out of junk mail we receive in our mail box.
I made a sign for my mailbox. Then it occurred to me that it would only take me ten or fifteen minutes to make a bunch of signs to enable my neighbours to opt out as well. Here’s what I ended up with (click to enlarge):
I came down the next morning and all the signs had been removed off my poster. Unfortunately, about half of them had been stuck on the outside of mail box doors, instead of inside:
Speaking as somebody who’s written a lot of instructions in my life, humans are universally lousy at following them.
Make Your Own Signs
Want to do this for your own apartment? Awesome. I updated my poster so that “inside” is bigger, and post a template for the signs and the poster itself on Doc Stoc. Just click through and you can download the PDFs. I recommend printing them out, cutting them up and attaching tape to each sign like I did. The more work you can do for people, the better.
If you do this (or already have), leave a comment and let us know.
UPDATE: Incidentally, you can also opt out of junk mail from Canadian Marketing Association members. I suspect that this represents just a small amount of the total junk mail I receive, but I’ve emailed the CMA to confirm that.
7 Comments »
October 25th, 2010, 5 Comments »
One of our current clients is a sizable, nationwide orgnization. For sundry reasons, I’ve got an email address for their domain, as in dbarefoot@ourclient.com. So, I receive a bunch of emails sent to the whole company, everybody in the head office and other large groups.
I easily receive five emails a week that begin with some variation of “sorry for the mass email”, and describe anything from a lost phone charger to available spots on the company’s softball team. They’re trivialities, and certainly not relevant to 95% of the recipients.
If the head office recipient list has 250 people on it, and each person spends, conservatively, 10 seconds processing this email, then that’s 40 minutes of wasted time per email. If there’s just five a week, that adds up to 175 hours of wasted time a year.
I’m no productivity fiend, though. I think the bigger scourge is the systematic irritation that we all suffer when we receive these emails. Plus, each time one of these is sent, it grants tacit permission to everybody else in the organization that it’s okay to send such emails.
Why, in 2010, do organizations still have this decade-old problem? The issue, I suspect, is a lack of confidence in the common alternative: the company intranet. That’s not surprising, because everybody loathes their intranet. Also, in most organizations, only a few senior people and administrators tend to have permission to publish intranet articles into the ‘global feed’, enabling news to appear on each user’s intranet home page.
So, if you’ve lost your phone charger, then you’re far likelier to locate it using a global email message instead of the intranet?
If the mass email is a nuclear warhead, and the intranet is an ineffectual BB gun, what other options are there? The kitchen bulletin board? Maybe the simplest option is to not to try to distribute trivial messages?
5 Comments »
September 9th, 2010, 3 Comments »
Incidentally, if you got a message from me in the last half-hour or so that looks like this, don’t click any of the links. I received this from a known Facebook friend, but clearly I should have worked a little harder to parse the title.
I think was just on autopilot. Bastard spammers. Eternal vigilance, and all that:
I subsequently received another similar message from another successfully-phished friend, though this one was for the even stranger sounding “Home Income Time”. Dear me.
3 Comments »
December 15th, 2009, 2 Comments »
Project Honey Pot is a side project by Unspam Technologies, and “gathers statistics on Internet robots and the spammers who sometimes use them to steal email addresses”. As I understand it, they work with website publishers to serve up fake, unique email addresses on web pages. Spammers’ bots discover these email addresses and start directing spam email at them. When they do, the project gathers information about when and from where the spam originated.
Apparently they then “work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers”. If they do, they ought to put some success stories on their website. I see value in the data collection, but I’d see more value in fewer spammers in the wild.
In any case, they just tracked their billionth spam message:
The message…was a United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) phishing scam. The spam email was sent by a bot running on a compromised machine in India (122.167.68.1). The spamtrap address to which the message was sent was originally harvested on November 4, 2007 by a particularly nasty harvester (74.53.249.34) that is responsible for 53,022,293 other spam messages that have been received by Project Honey Pot.
They’ve published a bunch of statistics about the data they collect. A few highlights:
- Monday is the busiest day of the week for email spam, while Saturday is the quietest.
- Malicious bots have increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 378% since Project Honey Pot started.
- It takes the average spammer 2 and a half weeks from when they first harvest your email address to when they send you your first spam message, but that’s twice as fast as they were five years ago.
I’ve said this before, but, thanks to Gmail, my email spam problem has nearly disappeared in the past couple of years.
2 Comments »
October 31st, 2007, 4 Comments »
About a year ago, I switched both my personal and email accounts over to Gmail for Domains. For the uninitiated, this means that we use the Gmail inteeface, but can retain our @darrenbarefoot.com and @capulet.com address.
Things were bumpy for the first couple of months, but since then it’s been awesome. There are plenty of advantages–great search, no backup anxiety, email access anywhere, a decent and improving web interface, IMAP support (though I don’t use it, it’s nice to know it’s there). However, the biggest change is a fairly subtle one–the grouping of email threads together into conversations. It makes my email usage way more efficient.
Lately I’ve combined Gmail with Mailplane (thanks to Tara for the recommendation), which is kind of an application shell for Gmail. It doesn’t provide a ton of stuff I desperately want, but it does get my email client out of the browser. That, combined with the drag-and-drop attachment functionality, makes it worth the US $25 I paid for a ‘family’ license.
I was reminded to write in praise of Gmail because I spotted this Gmail marketing piece via Digg. It indicates that 70% of the email to Gmail accounts is spam, yet their spam-blocking is so effective that less than 1% gets through.
I believe those numbers. I’ve had my darrenbarefoot.com account public for six or seven years, and I maybe receive one to two spam messages in my inbox.
That’s a fantastic improvement over a few years ago. My email spam problem is pretty much solved.
For now.
4 Comments »
