Newsletter June 2008
CEO Corner
by Dave Murray
[SPAM]
So here we are in the year 2008 with more to do than any other working generation before us – and less time to do it in. Who has time to get it all done? Then, to compound matters we are all bombarded with a whole bunch of junk mails – SPAM! – all day long. I happen to know who to blame for this problem.
I was reading an interesting article in the WSJ a few weeks ago and I discovered who Gary Thuerk is. Mr. Thuerk has the credit – or blame – as the father of spam. Yes.! At last we know who to hold accountable for all this electronic junk mail. We can all point our fingers at Mr. Thuerk and ask: “What were you thinking? “ And did you have any idea what you were creating? As it turns out, in May of 1978 Thurerk wanted to send an invitation to an open house to 400 people of the 2600 people with email accounts on the internet at that time. Dude? Postage was only 15 cents! Use conventional mail. Don’t be cluttering the public internet. Indeed, as a result of his e-mail way back in 1978 Mr. Thuerk received plenty of protests from his internet peers of the day. But, the trend was set and over time all of us have been sucked into the dark hole of junk mail.
There was a day that I only had to get junk mail in my physical mail box at home. It was annoying, but all I had to do was throw it in the trash. And, by the way, I got quite a big pleasure in doing that. Now all of a sudden I have to worry about electronic junk mail. One might say it’s just as easy to throw that junk mail into the trash, but there’s a bigger sorting issue with electronic junk mail. There happens to be this e-mail folder in my Outlook actually called “junk mail.” Here’s the problem: I have had really important emails go into my junk email box. Two or three days later I get a call from the sender asking me why I had not responded to their e-mail. Oops! Not a good situation.
It’s unfortunate, but SPAM has become an IT nightmare and a war. It’s become the world’s workers against the spammers! How can we get rid of this stuff? Bill Anderson and Tom Gillihan at Sterling Internet Solutions™ report that they block somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000,000 SPAM emails a day. Most of those emails are intended for local companies. Amazingly, these two gentlemen have found a way to scan all emails that come to their subscribers without significantly delaying the delivery of the email. They filter the emails for things that are obvious – adult content, known spammer addresses, prescription emails, and other known SPAM information. Those emails get automatically blocked and the intended recipient never gets the email. Emails that are suspicious, but not necessarily an obvious SPAM attack get tagged as [SPAM] at the header of the subject matter. It is probably because the email content contains a graphic or some combination of words that might indicate the email is coming from a spammer. On the flip side, if the emails that you send have a large graphic such as a company logo there is a chance that your email may end up being tagged as SPAM and end up in a junk mail folder. Recently, I removed our company logo from my email signature to avoid any error in tagging my emails.
While we are quoting some statistics like the one above, I came across this one that is frightening. There is so much spam that is being sent today that nine out of 10 e-mails sent across the globe are spam! That peace of information comes from a spam prevention company by the name of Postini™. They reported 7 billion SPAM emails in November of last year. Holy Spam Batman!
I think the bad news is that there are companies out there who make their living sending us solicitations we don’t want to receive. At times they seem to be winning this war. But, there are things that are being done to fight them. There is pending legislation. There are appliances that can tighten controls. And, best of all we have our friends at Sterling who enjoy the fight and seem to know how to block the worst of the daily deluge.
By the way, you may have noticed the word “dude” above. I admit to perhaps using language that is not exactly business professional. But, I did it on purpose, because next month I am going to be talking about the “language” of email. How many of you saw the Super bowl commercial where the only word mentioned during the entire commercial was “dude?” It was a clever commercial that caught my eye. There were about a dozen different voice inflections that gave the word dude a different meeting. As viewers we were easily able to interpret the meaning of dude. But, in an email picking up that inflection is nearly impossible and can often times cause a series of miscommunications. In case you want a warm-up for next months subject matter click here to view the commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmFBOVZ6BLM
Have a great June and remember that our goal is to deliver history making customer service to your desktop.
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