Quarter Life Crisis
The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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301 words
Rant ahead: I have several current e-mail addresses (plus an army of old ones that I have long forgotten about but some of which surprisingly still work – a friend once managed to track down a dozen of those and send me messages to them).
The idea behind them was to have one 'good' address for my friends and others to use on the web, for e-commerce and Usenet. These addresses undergo an elaborate system of forwarding (that I have lost track of) to minimise the probability of a message actually reaching me – both due to subsequent spam filters and possible points of failure.
The approximate result of that is: Originally I got most spam via my old (unused for more than a year) Usenet address, but the one I use on the web catches up. The one used for shopping doesn't get too much third party spam, surprisingly.
Now the idea of a 'good' address was to have it spam free so it is accessible, say when only having little time or bandwidth or webmail or a terminal. While this works OK so far, there are glitches now and again: Some Windows using acquaintances (would you let your friends use Windows?) are bound get a virus or CC my good address to their whole address book, thus spreading it to more potentially virus infested computers or sign me up for those funny joke mailings or give my address to some web site that I might enjoy.
All of these are things that make my address wider-known than I'd like it to be. But of course it doesn't make sense to give people two addresses and doing a lot of explaining.
So – better junk filters, please.
This rant was originally a part of my post on social networking sites.
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