The Measure of a Man Is the Size of His Junk Email Folder

You know you’ve been around the Internet for a long time – – a real player – – when the amount of spam you receive in a day eclipses the total of legitimate emails you receive in a week.  Let’s face it.  You can create all the Gmail accounts you want, but you still need to forward email to a single inbox for review.  As of 30 days ago, I was receiving approximately 100 to 150 spam emails a day.  Microsoft Outlook does a pretty crummy job separating legitimate email from spam.  We decided to go with a spam filtering service and ultimately decided Appriver.com would provide us spam service.

As with most everything else “technology”, the migration to Appriver’s webmail and spam filtering service was a nightmare.  Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong.  Their tech people initially set up the wrong MX record at our registrar, causing us to “go black” for two days.  All emails to us simply bounced back to the sender.  That sucked. 

It took them a long time to sort out the problem.  Much longer than it should have.  Initially, they denied that they had made any error.  Ultimately, it was clear that they had in fact pointed the email in the wrong direction.  Of course, once we got the service online, there was a significant amount of set-up, filtering options, resetting of SMTP and pop servers, etc.

It took us another two weeks to realize that we were not receiving any email from our contact page at our website.  We had some big projects going on at the time.  Every once in while, I would send an email to the contact email address and sure enough it would come through.  Our website, however, used a web form.  We did not realize that the web form hard-coded the MX record.  This meant that everyone who had tried to contact us for the last two weeks was simply unable to do so.  Worse yet, the sender of inquiries through our website would have no knowledge that the email had not gotten through.  That sucks. 

Of course, I have a high tolerance for these types of things having been in the technology business for almost twenty years.  You have to have thick skin when it comes to technology.  Otherwise, you would go mad.  Everyone who’s got a computer knows what it’s like when that computer won’t start up in the morning, the battery is dead or, for some mysterious reason, it won’t find a wireless network.  Technology is oftentimes like a schizophrenic, drug addicted teenager with 1001 excuses as to why something doesn’t work. 

Now that I have had time to settle in to my new spam filtering, I must say that I am pretty damn happy.  Appriver has cut the spam down to almost nothing.  It really pulls in email that should’ve made it through and sends me a report each day indicating what emails have been filtered as spam.  I can release any emails that should have found their way into my inbox.  The stress of trying to identify a legitimate emails in a sea inbox spam is now gone.  At first, I thought that something must be wrong.  The lack of “volume” gave me the sensation that work was drying up.  The reality was that I know simply receive those emails that I am supposed to receive from legitimate people on legitimate issues. 

If anyone else has grown tired of spam clogging their inbox, I would be interested to hear how you are dealing with the issue and how much success you are having.  And if I don’t respond to your comment right away, don’t worry.  I’m just feeling sorry for myself because I’m no longer as important as I used to be.  My Outlook email volume has gone down.  I am not nearly as important as I used to think I was…