Wouldn't help.
90% or more of the spam complaints I see come when users see a mailbox
full of spam, select everything in the mailbox in frustration, and
report everything as spam in bulk. They aren't even opening the
messages. It's a frustration reaction caused by AOL's absolute
inability to really dent the amount of spam that gets into their
mailboxes.
The argument I had with the woman I ended up inviting to leave was over
my refusal to add subject line flags on the mailing list messages (list
members probably know my attitude towards that...). I admit that after
that fight I reconsidered my position, but since I've yet to have
another issue like that, I ended up doing nothing. But it seems the
only way to have a chance to avoid this kind of problem.
It's an unfortuate situation. Huge infrastructure, many of the key
techs who built it have left, the spam problem continues to escalate,
they're trying to deal with it with fireaxes and shotguns (lots of
collateral damage), and still have huge amounts of spam get through,
and they've built stupid tools that their (generally tech naive) users
use wrong, and nobody at AOL seems capable of figuring out what to do
about it. And because (ultimately) they've failed at stopping spam, and
as people shift to broadband, people are leaving AOL in droves, so
revenues are dropping, making hiring and capital improvements difficult.
of course, they dug themselves this hole, so I'm only somewhat
sympathetic. But my dealings with AOL the last year have generally left
me frustrated, not satisfied. My mom was never happier the day she got
moved from AOL to Earthlink. For all their "internet with training
wheels" motif, she found them unreliable and the software horribly
non-intuitive on top of everything else. Now she's using OS X, ID (soon
to be Safari) and mail.app, and having a ball...
On Thursday, July 17, 2003, at 06:49 AM, Tom Neff wrote:
> This makes me think - Barry, are you listening? - that it might be a
> nice
> idea to have a "diplomacy header" that could be configured into lists.
Follow-Ups:
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