Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Thursday night / Friday morning I went through the messages in my mailbox flagged "new", answered a couple of them, left a bunch in my mailbox marked as "read" to file later, copied several to a "these are messages I really need to deal with when I have the energy to cope" file so they won't get overlooked in the main mailbox, and deleted gobs of spammage.

A few minutes ago I started to do the same thing again, but figured I'd take some notes.

• 447 new messages arrived Friday, most of which were sorted into other files by Procmail in the process of being delivered. (I had to cat some stuff together to look up this number.)
• 79 new messages in my mail mailbox -- after anything sent to a mailing list, certain automatic notifications and everything my old spam filters know how to detect is already filed elsewhere.
• 68 real spam messages missed by my filter.
• 1 "effectively spam" message (that I don't want, but it's a side effect of having signed up for something, so I just ignore it and don't consider it complainable).
• 4 LiveJournal notifications.
• 2 "Hey look at this URL" messages from a friend.
• 3 messages related to business (one from someone I owed money to (check mailed Friday afternoon) and two from one of the photo labs I use).
• 1 just-keeping-in-touch message.

I was an early-adopter of email. Before I even got access to Usenet (I wasn't even close to ARPAnet then, and there wasn't anything called the Internet yet), I was using an email system that dmk implemented to deliver messages between users of the HP3000 we had accounts on. I used to keep up with steady conversations in email along with monitoring and posting to a bunch of Usenet newsgroups. I've been in the "check my mail every time I walk past a terminal/computer" club for a very long time. I was subscribed to fairly high-traffic mailing lists while most of my relatives were saying, "What's the point to this email thing?" or complaining that it sounded complicated. I wound up conducting much of my social life -- and organizing nearly all of it -- online. I maintained a couple of local mailing lists. I list email as the most reliable way to reach me. When I was an AT&T cell-phone customer, I had my mail (after filtering) forwarded to my phone. I used to flip between a Usenet window, an IRC window, a mail window, a private-chat window, and whatever I was actually trying to get done, and keep up with all of those simultaneously. The point of all this is that even though my ability to cope with the firehose of text information has dimished since the fibromyalgia clobbered me, I'm one of the people who is used to dealing with email, managing lots of email, and dealing with sorting out the different sources of it. Nowadays I make the job easier by having Procmail sort messages for me.

When I start feeling overwhelmed by my inbox and not up to dealing with wading through it; when I start losing messages in the noise (most recently an order for a copy of Spinning Reels via PayPal that I didn't notice for a week); when this happens despite my having sorted each mailing list to a separate folder where I can ignore it when I get busy, spam has demolished the usefulness of email.

I remember when spamming started, and some people said, "Just hit the delete key -- how big a problem can it be?" while others spoke of the "tragedy of the commons" and predicted that spam could eventually make Usenet and email unusable. How many newsgroups have choked and died on spam? How many people have given up on email entirely? (Seriously, I know some who have -- they no longer even check their email, having given up on being able to find the real messages in it about a year and a half ago.) How many of us who still rely on email find it a chore to manage?

This was predicted. And also bloody pointless. But seemingly inevitable, despite the stupidity of it.