When Michael Kaminer sends an e-mail, the public relations
executive is careful not to use phrases like "thanks" or
"how are you" in the subject line, which could get his
message deleted before it's even opened. Such wording is often
associated with spammers and scammers who try to fool people into
reading their e-mails.
If he really needs to get a message through to someone, he doesn't
use e- mail at all.
"I'll now send a handwritten note or even fax," said
Kaminer, whose tech- savvy clients include San Francisco's
BabyCenter.com.
E-mail has changed the way people communicate, but the
proliferation of spam, phishing attacks and other online nuisances is
changing the way people use it. For some, the flood of unwanted
e-mails is forcing them to abandon it altogether.
As much as 70 percent of e-mail, 12 billion messages a day, is spam,
according to estimates by IronPort Systems, an e-mail security firm in
San Bruno. And a growing percentage of that spam involves phishing
attacks, spyware, adware or some other insidious invader.
George Bushneff, a letter carrier from San Rafael, said he has
stopped using e-mail.
"I was getting all this spam, and it was all from me," he
said, amazed at spammers' wizardry at how they disguise their own
identity and substitute the sender's address.
Marilynne Rudick, a partner in E-Write, a writing consulting
company in Maryland that specializes in online communication, has
missed out on a number of legitimate e-mails because they were
mistaken as spam.
"I have a friend in Singapore who sent me an e-mail from a
Yahoo account that said, 'Hi let's have lunch.' I never opened it. It
sounded like it was going to be porn," Rudick said. "She got
to town and asked, 'Didn't you get my e-mail?' "
Another legitimate e-mail, this one from a woman wanting to buy one
of Rudick's books, never made it through presumably because of where
it came from: Nigeria. Spam filters frequently block Nigerian
e-mailers because of the Nigerian scam, in which the sender pretends
to be a deposed prince's son looking for a dupe to make a deposit in
an overseas bank account.
Spam has also forced many people to change their e-mail addresses.
Richard Rongstad of Concord judiciously gives out his new address
and lets his old one accumulate spam.
"Unfortunately, my older e-mail addresses will live almost
forever in UseNet and on Web pages archived by the likes of Yahoo and
Google, so I will be using the throwaway spam traps for a long
time," he said in an e-mail.
Many people devote hours to deleting or outsmarting their e-mail.
Bob Cullinan, a marketing consultant in San Rafael, said spam
filters seem to block messages sent to large groups of people,
assuming they must be bulk.
"It seems like you can send an e-mail to three people, but any
more than that can often trigger a filter that sends your e-mail down
the drain," Cullinan said in an e-mail.
"So if I need to send something to multiple recipients, I'll
limit the number of addresses on each mailing and send the same text
to all in separate e-mails. It's a bit of a pain, but it ensures that
the message will reach the intended people."
Spam's impact on how some people are using or not using e-mail has
a tinge of irony.
Brian Olson, director of marketing communications for Video
Professor, a Colorado company that teaches people how to use
computers, said his firm has many e-mail filters in place because his
boss had been a victim of identity theft.
"With all our growing internal safeguards, my e-mails to my
boss weren't reaching him," Olson said in an e-mail. "It's
ironic that a technology meant to help us communicate actually forced
me to call him more when traveling and (to go) downstairs to his
office to see him in person.
"Personal contact as the result of e-mail technology.
Interesting concept! There might be a future to face-to-face
communication!"
