Spam Keeps the Post Office in Business

I have a friend who uses a popular free webmail service - Hotmail.

I'm not sure exactly when - but sometime over the last several months she simply stopped receiving email from me. It took at least a few weeks to ascertain exactly what was going on. You rarely here back from someone that they missed your email unless they were otherwise expecting it.

Fortunately, she also has a Gmail account - which seems to get my messages just fine. In general Google seems to screw up about 10% as often as Microsoft these days. In fact, it's been my observation that Microsoft's entire search (and search marketing) strategy is to imitate the competition - but just do it poorly. Macintosh users may say this strategy has actually worked for them in the past.

From my experience, the main reason people fail to get email is due to errant filtering systems. Some email system administrator has become convinced that combining blacklists A, B and C in conjunction with setting SpamAssassin to filter threshold X they will have the best spam blocker ever deployed.

Inevitably, important client Q or CEO's best-friend Z is on one of the blacklists and has their email deleted. Other times important supplier #1 has their invoices vanish into oblivion.

However, if this hypothetical system administrator chooses to filter no message - they have an equally problematic situation. With 150 pieces of unwanted mail landing in each inbox, no one can locate their wanted messages anyways.

What's painful is that email could be a truly powerful medium for so many more things than it already.

I currently receive about 10 pieces of important physical mail each week. I'd rather get the information electronically, but there's no way to do this reliably. The odds of some piece of spam protection software deleting it are just too high.

Would you ever expect to receive notifications about impending mortgage payments or credit card bills via mail? While I do get random incorrectly delivered non-critical physical mail, I can't recall ever missing a bill.

If not for spam - physical mail delivery would be in the process of getting phased out.

I'm not the only one who's made this observation. See Michael Osterman's When will e-mail be as reliable as postal mail?.

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