Jeff Blogs

It is an inevitable fact that if you have an email account you are going to have SPAM. I have used the same email address for over a decade and as you might can imagine, I am now being inundated with unwanted email messages. I have tried nearly every tool imaginable to try and minimize the number of SPAM messages I have to deal with. This has included white lists, black lists, and several tools and appliances that will stop these messages from being delivered. The problem has been that while some of these solutions have eliminated the SPAM messages they have also deleted some of my messages that weren’t SPAM. Even worse some of these have begun to filter out specific users and domains no longer delivering mail from some domains. These domains are not some small or questionable domains but rather some of the bigger and more respected companies on the Internet such as apple.com, mattel.com, or dbacks.com. Obviously this was unacceptable and I needed to make some changes so that I could continue to rely on email as a communications method.

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From an early age I was told I was not quite normal. That seems like kind of a harsh thing to tell a kid especially if you are that kid’s parents. The thing was, I thought that was a good thing so I grew up thinking that not being normal was actually a good trait to have. I can’t really explain why but I just seem to have the ability of piecing things together slightly different than other people. In some ways this has been a great thing. I have a knack of looking at something from a different perspective and providing an observation that might otherwise go unnoticed. On the other hand this can sometimes get me in trouble or at least into an area that is uncharted and pretty weird. The invention of the computer and more specifically the Internet hasn’t helped at all; in fact it has made matters worse. Now I have a lot more information at my disposal I tend to put it together in rather unique ways. Take e-mail for example. Like many of you I get up each day and check my email and find out that more than half of my in-box has been filled with SPAM. Usually at this moment I take a severe detour to begin trying to understand why unwanted email was named after a canned meat product but I’ll spare you from that and try to get right to the point. Unlike most people, I don’t just immediately start deleting these unwanted messages. Instead I read each one. I blame my mother for this. She always said that if someone is willing to take the time to send you a letter you should at least have the common courtesy of reading it and acknowledging them. So for some unknown reason I started replying to SPAM and what I found is that those people really don’t want you to reply because they never respond back or if they do it is usually to ask me to quit emailing them. That seems a little messed up don’t you think? Today I got an email and I thought maybe I would share it with you.

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