Spam adds noise to email

For some reason this made news, the spam that people get will cause legitimate messages to be missed due to the high noise ration spam puts in their inbox.

It notes that perhaps the best way is to call the person in order to know if it got through or not.

I'm not so sure that this is all that different from regular mail. If you send me an envelope, there is a good chance it will get through to me. It might take longer than expected though. Or somewhere along the line it might get corrupted (rain makes it wet, for example). Or it could get lost. Or it could be that it gets delivered to my house, but I just have too much junk mail and it gets lost in the shuffle.

So the same rules apply there - people will frequently follow up with more hands-on methods to ensure important messages reached their destination in the "snail mail" world too. They may call, or they may resort to a more assured delivery method (something like FedEx perhaps, where there is a signature showing it was hand delivered to the person).
The same applies to the digital world - if you really must know that the person got the message - then you need to either call them, or resort to a more certain delivery system like having them download a file via HTTP or FTP, or even a file sharing system.

Posted by Eric at February 25, 2005 05:20 PM | TrackBack