Email addiction survey

The great folks over at Zettasphere and Emailmonday have released their Email Addiction Survey. Nothing surprising in the data that I can see, although I suspect one particular data point is going to surprise folks.

Yup, more than 70% of people don’t really care about a do not reply address in a message. Honestly, I’m not surprised. Most users don’t really care. In all honesty it probably doesn’t affect delivery that much any longer, either. I still think it’s generally a bad idea but as long as you’re providing a communications channel for recipients to connect with your company it’s probably not going to be a giant problem.

 

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Memories of Spam in May

This morning on Facebook a friend posted a picture saying that 15 years ago was the very first anti-spam conference (Spamcon*). All we have are some blurry scans of pictures and coffee mugs.
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That 550 sign belonged to the bar where the night out was held. It got bought by K & P and lived in their garden until it rotted away a few years ago. So many folks who are still active in the space, and so many folks who’ve moved on. Names I’d forgotten, faces I haven’t.
Many of those folks are still working in email. Some on the sending side, some on the tools and vendor side, some on the ISP side, some on the consulting side.  That conference was one of the very first times people publicly gathered to talk about spam. There were other occasions, but most were invite only with hand picked representatives of specific companies.
At that first Spamcon I was freshly laid off from MAPS (now Trend Micro). I was considering what next. The thing is, I really liked the work I was doing. MAPS had me leading a team to provide abuse desk as an outsourced service. We had a very large network provider as a customer and we were handling all the mail that came into abuse@ there. It was a challenge, I was creating processes and documenting policy, trying to do more with less and managing my first team ever.
Much of what I do now, here, grew out of that position. It was clear even then there was a need for someone who could help navigate the challenges of email.
In the same thread another person posted pictures from a social night in DC during the FTC Spam Forum. More folks, some I have lost touch with and some who are still friends and colleagues.
We were so young. All of us.
This is yet another form of community that email created. Some of it was built over email, but a lot of it happened on USENET and IRC and local meetups. There were so many ways we built community using plain text and dialup. The technology has changed, and that community from a dozen years ago has changed but it’s still all the same deep down inside.
SpamconMugs
 
(* If, at any point, you see me type Spamconk instead of Spamcon please blame autocorrect. It’s being difficult and even tries to correct it when I go back and edit sentences.)

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Why care about email?

I got my first email address in the very late 80s. I was an intern at a government agency. I learned a lot there: how to sequence DNA, how to handle radioactive material, how to handle human pathogens, and how to send email. I got my first non-work non-school address in the mid-90s. One of the first things I did was join some mailing lists.
One of them was a list for folks who had pet rabbits. I met a lot of people there, both online and in person. As with many people we meet through a shared interest as our interest wanes the relationships change. Some relationships were maintained, but some of us lost touch with one another. Moves, job changes, email address changes, they all affect our ability to maintain relationships online. I kept in touch with some, one was the maid of honor at my wedding and a few years ago I was the maid of honor at hers. I lost track of others.
 

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Who didn't invent email, part 2

Back in 2014, Steve wrote an article discussing Shiva Ayyadurai,and his claims that he was the inventor of email. In that article he links to a number of articles from Techdirt. Earlier this year, Shiva sued Floor64, the parent company of Techdirt, as well as Michael Massnick the Founder, CEO and editor and Leigh Beadon, a writer for Techdirt. (Original Complaint pdf from ReCAP). Ars Technica has a good article on Shiva and his claims.

The complaint asserts that the defendants defamed Shiva in their articles, caused him economic harm and inflicted emotional distress on him.
Today the judge dismissed the case (Memorandum and Order, pdf from ReCAP) against Michael and Leigh.  The legal standard for punishable defamatory statements is there must be a way to prove them true or false. The judge ruled that since there is not a single definition of email, that there is no way to definitively prove Techdirt’s statements as true or false.
No one disputes the Shiva coded a system that encompasses the features we expect of any desktop or web based mail client. As many people have mentioned, the fact he was 14 and put together a complex program is impressive in and of itself. No one is disputing what he did accomplish.
To my mind the fundamental core of email is interoperability. It’s that I can sit in my lab at the University of Wisconsin, type a message, hit send and have someone in Boston receive the message. I can sit here in my office in California and write to my client in the the UK. The bits of the email client, which define email according to Shiva, are not email. They’re important for usability, but they’re not what makes  email email.
According to Ars Technica, Shiva is going to appeal the dismissal.
EDIT: Techdirt has posted an article on the lawsuit and the dismissal.
 

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