Journal Entry: December 15, 2001
Well, Christmas is nearly here. I’m almost done with my shopping and may finish the rest up this weekend. We watched The Avengers last night on DVD. It pretty much sucked. Maybe I’d like it more if I were a fan of the original TV series.
My pet peeve of the day is for-profit companies that don’t read and reply to their email. This has happened to me twice in the past week. First is the Harry Fox Agency, a company that licenses songs written by one person for use in a recording by another. They have a website and a customer service email address for questions, but a week after sending them a question by email, they still haven’t responded. The other time this happened to me this week is with a company called Colorado Weddings, which - as you may have guessed - organizes weddings in Colorado. They also have an email address, to which I sent a note requesting more information on north Denver venues they work with. Still no response.
Speaking of email, last week my hatred of spam email finally came to a head. I realized that well over 50% of the mail I was getting was spam, so I shut down one of my email accounts that was the source of a lot of it. I can no longer be reached at ToddBradley@bigfoot.com. Originally, the Bigfoot concept seemed great. Their tagline was “Email for Life” and the idea is that you’d get one email address that you could use forever, and it would just forward messages to you at another address. So, you could have it point at your home ISP email and then if you switched ISPs someday you just point it to the new one. Well, eventually realizing they didn’t have a viable business plan, Bigfoot started making a requirement that if you were going to use their “free” email for life service, you have to accept advertisements delivered to your mailbox. In the end, I wasn’t willing to do that, so I canceled my service. Also, I looked at a number of anti-spam programs and settled on one called Spam Eater Pro, which I purchased. It filters out spam messages using two different methods - checking senders’ addresses with a number of anti-spam services (like ORBS and RBL, two of the most famous) and also filtering based on regular expressions in the header and body. Between those two methods, it’s doing a good job of deleting my spam before it ever gets to me, and it only cost $25.