The late great Spike Milligan recounted in his hilarious war memoirs how a comrade was arrested while home on leave and charged with indecent exposure after being caught in flagrante delicto with a young lady in a public doorway. As sentence was passed the offender told the judge: ‘I’ll tell thee summat. Tha’ll never stop fooking in Bradford.’
Despite an EU directive that prohibits the sending of bulk commercial e-mail to recipients who have not clearly indicated that they want to receive such messages, we should steel ourselves to the realisation that our e-mail inboxes are as unlikely to be suddenly free of spam as the doorways of wartime Bradford were free of courting couples.
For one thing, much spam originates in countries outside the jurisdiction of the EU. For another, e-mail is such a convenient means of communication that many companies, regardless of strictures, will continue to use it to transmit pertinent information to people they believe with reasonable justification might be interested in at least considering their products or services. What is so terrible about that?
Under the new regulations many such messages may be classified as spam and their senders subjected to the same opprobrium deserved of porn peddlers. It would be unfortunate if such a ‘politically correct’ attitude towards the receipt of any unsolicited mail were to become entrenched, especially as the enforcement regime for the new regulations is likely to be toothless in the extreme. An increased sense of outrage, coupled with a limited likelihood of legal redress, will do nothing for the efficacy of e-mail as a business tool.
Because – and take this from someone who gets more than his fair share of spam and for whom e-mail is perhaps the most critical IT application – spammers are not the worst, the most time-wasting or the most stress-inducing of e-mail users.
At the end of the day a spam is something one just deletes. On the other hand, messages which one is duty bound to read and process, but which are sent in a careless, perfunctory and presumptuous manner are the real time wasters.
Now I resent as much as anybody the flood of messages to my inbox offering to thicken my hairline, thin my waistline and lengthen other parts of me, and I welcome the development of technology that helps us limit that torrent to a trickle.
The administrator of our corporate firewall assures me that on average 30 per cent of the incoming mail to this organisation never reaches our desktops (thank you Spam Assassin). However, given that as a news organisation we are more tolerant than most about accepting unsolicited mail, a lot of spam still gets through nonetheless.
Here is not the place to rail against the specifics of the journalist’s profession, other than to take a swipe at the marketers who think that on their own the words ‘Press Release’ in the subject field will have me slavering with anticipation as I open the attached file ‘PR07321.doc’ to see what riches are contained within.
However, for each profession that makes use of e-mail, there are probably preferred norms of behaviour regarding how mails are formatted, what information should be included and whether and to whom they should be sent.
A little care and awareness on the part of genuine senders of e-mail, as to how best to approach their audiences, will do more for people’s blood pressure and to improve the perception of the worth of e-mail than a host of spam directives.
I realise that such opinions are so far out of step with the zeitgeist, that I am likely to receive a flood of mail putting me in my place. Do your worst, ye righteous. Consider your opinions solicited in advance. It takes more than unsolicited mail to set my knees trembling.
26/11/2003
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