Wednesday, December 29, 2004

A Modern Irony: Email Has Become More Unreliable In the early days of email, which for me was in the early 80s, email was unreliable because the networks and the computers were unreliable. You could never be quite sure your email would get there. Then as the networks became more reliable email was hardly ever dropped. This period marked one of those golden ages that acutally happened. The net was mostly civilized, interesting, and the email always got through. Now in this modern age of ultra spiffy everything, email has become even more unreliable than it ever was. New email preditors have evolved at a voracious rate. Your ISP filters email. Your virus checker filters email. Your corporation filters email. Your fake AI despaminator can manage to drop some of your most important email while letting through every kind of porn garbage known to Larry Flynt. Yet enough spam gets through that every day is a denial of mind space attack in your email box. It's not just that email has become unreliable, it's that email from some unknown person in your domain has become the tripwire that can bring the brown shirts a knocking. If somone innocently mistakes one your emails as spam and complains, they can instantly start a chain of events that will blacklist your domain off the digital world. The biggest driver of the internet becomes its own source of futility. Now Alanis, that's irony. comment[] 10:10:46 AM

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