I'm Done with Electronic Mail [rant]

[minusonebit]

After this recent bullshit with AOL (who, after I setup RDNS then told me I needed to establish a "feedback loop" if I wanted unblocked) I have offically decided I will stop using e-mail alltogether. Fuck this shit, I dont have time for it any longer. Just because someone else created a standard and got a few other people to delcare it to be a good idea dosent mean that it is.

The protocols that make up what most people call "e-mail" are outdated, insecure and useless. Its been around since the internet began as a US FedGov communications project, back when the people who used it could be trusted to display a little common sense (except for Digital Equiptment Corporation, which is credited with sending the very first SPAM in the history of mankind) and act with a small amount of intelligence. Those days are clearly gone and gone quite long ago.

This last month, my mail server relayed about one and a half million inbound messages, but it sent less than two thousand. That means that out of half a million messages in, only 2 thousand (or 0.000133...%) of messages were legit and actually needed a response. And thats if we assume that every outbound message was actually in response to a legit message, which it wasnt, alot of the messages we generated by scripts or stuff that I or others composed from scratch and sent to people. The rest was spam. Utter feces that had no use and was not deserving of the resources expended to deal with, proess, filter and delete it.

I have ordered my designer to create a device that can best be described as a ticket system which will be the new and only means of contacting me. There will be visual confirmation, accounts, management consoles and so on. He said he'll have it done by next weekend. I love Argentina coders, they are so fast, so eagar to please... and work so cheap.

Within 30 days, I will discontinue all e-mail services on all of my servers including for my hosting customers. I will replace it with a user account on my newly-developed ticket system, whicch thier website visitors can login to and and check for new messages. Anyone that dosent like it is free to go fuck themselves because I dont care how many people bitch about it I am not changing my mind.

For those too stubborn to join the 21st century and communicate with me on my level, i.e. companies that I have to still be able to get e-mail from like my banks, I'll keep a couple of gmail accounts around.

For once, I'm gonna be on the cutting edge of technology. I'll be offering the worlds very first 100% guranteed spam-free hosting ever. A life without spam and bullshit, here I come! I cant fucking wait.

Again, I would like to hand out an extra big, extra special, fuck you to AOL for ruining the internet. Al Gore may have invented the internet, but AOL will be credited for ruining it.

FUCK AOL!

Oh yes, and AOL: I'm going to tell all of my website visitors to call these numbers when they want to know why they cant send us e-mail.

> http://postmaster.info.aol.com/contact/index.html

Godbye e-mail, you will not be missed.

Oh, I am so angry right now that those around me are seriously at risk for bodily injury.

[LiveDose]

Huh what?

[pocketkangaroo]

I say you sue the asses over at MIT for creating it in the first place.

[Adult Warden]

I couldn't be bothered to read thru all that...Are you going to sue AOL now?

[L-Pink]

aol

[minusonebit]

Originally Posted by Adult Warden

I couldn't be bothered to read thru all that...Are you going to sue AOL now?

Thats a good idea!

[Tempest]

Have you sued epass yet? I think the 3 days or whatever it was have elapsed now.

[Doctor Dre]

Have you ever heard about spamarrest ? sounds like you are giving yourself a lot of trouble when you have software that can just do what you said and filter your emails.

right now you are just cutting off a part of the world from your business.

[Ron Bennett]

You're not the only one who is fed up with the state of email these days.

Many people say filtering is the answer, but I've known many people lose email that way due to false positives.

Proprietary web-based communication systems are definitely the way to go ... they greatly lighten the load and add accountability - one can see if their message is read or not, is more secure, and most of all throws up roadblocks that deters all, but the most determined, spammers.

* On a side note, the more widely deployed a web-based communication system is, the more vulnerable it is to being exploited by spammers - so I wouldn't suggest calling it spam-free ... but rather tout its features, such as less spam, more security, etc.

Email is more and more becoming a notification system (ie. acct signups, order receipts, news letters, etc) as opposed to a full-fledged two-way communications medium.

Many people I know rarely send email and furthermore change email accounts all the time when the spam level gets too high and/or for more privacy.

Ron

[Gillespie]

You just need Spam Arrest. Also, you need to have a gmail account for forum and website signups, since Spam Arrest will block them.

[studiocritic]

i feel dumber after reading this

[minusonebit]

Originally Posted by Ron Bennett

You're not the only one who is fed up with the state of email these days.

Many people say filtering is the answer, but I've known many people lose email that way due to false positives.

Proprietary web-based communication systems are definitely the way to go ... they greatly lighten the load and add accountability - one can see if their message is read or not, is more secure, and most of all throws up roadblocks that deters all, but the most determined, spammers.

* On a side note, the more widely deployed a web-based communication system is, the more vulnerable it is to being exploited by spammers - so I wouldn't suggest calling it spam-free ... but rather tout its features, such as less spam, more security, etc.

Email is more and more becoming a notification system (ie. acct signups, order receipts, news letters, etc) as opposed to a full-fledged two-way communications medium.

Many people I know rarely send email and furthermore change email accounts all the time when the spam level gets too high and/or for more privacy.

Ron

Yep, exactly. Everyone has a spam soultion. Hell, Baracudda Networks sells appliance like things that sit between your mail server and the real world and it only costs about $10K for the largest one, plus several thousand a year to keep its "spam definitions" updated. Supposedly, its very effective. Software constantly needs tweaked and tunned, and like you said, plenty of false positives so you loose legit mail and some spam always still manages to sneak in. You can burn though a shitload of money trying to kill spam and still not be any (or much) better than when you started off on your crusade.

I am to the point where I am just saying "fuck it". People have preserved the whole "[email protected]" method of operation far too long, well past its usefulness. To me, a communication medium is no longer useful if 99.99% of the stuff that comes through it is junk. Just think, if your phone rang 1.5 million times in a month and only 2,000 times it was someone that you wanted to talk to, you'd get rid of your phone.

The problem that I face with this is no one wants to go back to the web and check and see if someone responded to thier little message. And when every site goes to something like this, who wants to spend thier day running around to various different sites checking to see if they got a response. So in that sense, I pretty much have to add legacy support to send replies back to the ticket submitter via e-mail.

E-mail is convienent in one limited respect, but inconvient in all others, but that one little aspect of e-mail keeps so many end users holding on for dear life it isnt even funny.

[minusonebit]

Originally Posted by studiocritic

i feel dumber after reading this

Aww, thats too bad. Just think of how I feel after I read your reply.

[munki]

Smoke signals and carrier pigeons... only way to go...

[Trax]

who are you again?