Okay I have a problem keeping my mouth shut. Succeed most of the time, but often fail causing some rather stupid pain-in-the-necks.
This post is inspired by yet another blabbering-mouth thing, this time in frustration at what I like to call soft-spam. Hard-spam is like that unsolicited XXX kind of messages or "Buy This!" type things from unknown people. Soft-spam on the other hand is from your own friends or from people who know you. Mostly its just stupid 'cutesy' forwards, and the infamous "Forward this to 20 other people within 45 minutes to get luck or else.." type messages. So I felt pretty pleased with myself when I implemented a simple filter in my mail account that would move every message with the subject starting with "Fwd:", the web standard for forwards which gets attached automatically to the subject field when you click forward in any mail provider's service, to a separate label/folder and skip the inbox, so that I would never need to read them or have stupid messages enlisted in my inbox. And soon enough, my separate folder was brimming with "Fwd: Take this 'Are you Hot?!' test" etc etc things. Only 5 legitimate forwards were present in it, like a forward from my comp teacher regarding some programming competition in Chennai and stuff. Small price to pay since there was a ratio of 1:4 of legitimate to nonsense stuff. And I keep checking my forwards folder to ensure that nothing of value is left unread. And obviously I never bother to read these stupid mails anymore. I don't even have to take the effort of deleting them now.
This said, I need to come back to the basic point.. my Big Mouth. I was feeling so pleased with myself, that I told one of my friends about my filter since he too complained about being soft-spammed a lot. Dumb person.. now he's joined the soft-forwarders gang too, and ensures that he removes the "Fwd:" thing from the subject (it can be edited always.. it just gets inserted automatically. Can be removed), hence effectively beating my system. He does that purposely, since nobody likes their messages unread, however dumb they may be. Even if its not their own message. And I can't filter with keywords since the chances of a keyword being legitimately present in a message is high too.
3 comments:
Me and my rest of the family share the same email client (Opera).Once thoroughly sick of the dumb forwards I applied the fwd: filter on the client.Big mistake.Several of my dad's important forwards bounced of to spam.After wondering
loudly why he wasn't recieving his mails he checked in the spam box and saw his belated mails there.I shrugged in a
way that said the filter must have installed itself ;-)
spammer's are growing fast. gmail is stopping them as fast. I get much more spam on my Y! Account right in my inbox.
That problem occurs if you don't check your Forwards label. Its hardly any effort, literally just one click and roll of an eyeball (two if you like). More effort to delete it. I actually derive pleasure in seeing my filter throw messages out. :-) Sadistic and twisted humour.
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