Technorama
An omnibus of tech posts by a Futurologist on software development primarily.Tuesday, 8 November 2011
The scurge of noreply emails
Luckily no company dares to do it with their postal address. Imagine getting your order letter:
From:
Online Books
No Street
No town
No county
NO1 4BG
So why do firms get away with these noreply bulk emails? Email is a two way communication, that's why I have a valid from address on email I send to companies I am trading with.
As part of email 2.0, invalid email addresses should be rejected by SMTP servers, preventing companies sending these emails to people.
Labels: email
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Email 2.0 - We all need PGP email, for certainty and to prevent spam
For everyone to benefit from encrypted/signed email, it has to be easy. Even as easy as the keys resiging on the GMail or Yahoo!Mail server. The lack of ease, is the only thing preventing addoption.
I'd like to email my accountant, and colleagues confidential documents, but I can't because the email would be un-encrypted.
Likewise, the person emailing me would be able to sign their email with a PGP signature. If that signature was invalid, I would know it was fraudulent.
PGP would assist with anti-spam systems, because I don't have to accept email from someone with a 0 PGP rating of their email address, the same way I don't have to buy from an eBay user with (0) feedbacks ;)
Sunday, 9 January 2011
jon@facebookmail.com
Thursday, 28 January 2010
Time to pay for email?
Like calling an organisation or person, I have to pay the cost of the
phone call! Likewise for sending them a letter (with the exception of
organisations offering FREEPOST addresses). Perhaps we should do the
same for email, 1p per email externally to start with?
"One of the best ways to deal with externalities is to create a market. This means we start respecting other people's inbox as their own property, and stop dumping into it without consideration. We create a system that forces people to bear more of the costs of their actions."
Interesting to consider the options to try cut back on both unnecessary email and spam email. Having authenticated SMTP servers on a white list would make it much eaier to see who was actually emailing too.
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
Web unified HOME folder and email
Essentially we have two folder hierarchies, HOME folder, and email Inbox etc when we only need one!
So currently I have in my HOME folder I have:
Documents
Music
Videos
Photos
Public
Deleted
Tosort
In my Email I have:
Inbox
Drafts
Sent
Deleted
Documents
Take the example of me quoting for some work. On a spreadsheet I calculate my costs, my fees and I email my total quote to client as my tender. Now in a conventional system I could not store that spreadsheet with the email. I need to keep two different directory structures.
So I'd like my email client to operate on the HOME folder, I even have "Tosort" which is basically an "Inbox" and of cause Deleted.
So this means we have:
Inbox
Drafts
Sent
Documents
Photos
Videos
Public
Deleted
This allows more flexibility, I can even save a document and photo in the same folder which contains my email about the same topic for future reference.
For true flexibility this unified HOME directory would be hosted on a server, so I can access from any of my netbooks, and weblogins.
Monday, 28 September 2009
Easy email unsend cancel design ;)
Labels: email
Monday, 13 October 2008
Why web forms are bad (compared to email)
Short run down of why web-forms are bad for messages:
- Tiny form boxes, pledgebank is a great example, limited to 7 words per line.
- Often arbitrary restrictions on the text that can be written. Lincolnshire NHS trust have a secret blocked character list including ",', and ; then they limit to 255 characters.
- Often fails to "Submit" and when you click back of cause it has lost all your text.
- Leaves me with no record in my Sent folder of what I've written.
- No way to forward the message I have sent to a friend, or another department at the organisation.
Saturday, 29 December 2007
Fix outlook to *not* top-post!
"Do not automatically include the original message
- In the main Office Outlook 2007 window, on the Tools menu, click Options.
- Click the Preferences tab, and then click E-Mail Options.
- Under On replies and forwards, in the When replying to a message drop-down list, select Do not include original message."
Labels: email
Wednesday, 14 November 2007
Incorrect email from, envelope-sender and reply-to addresses
Take the example of this marketing email I got from Holiday Extras. The return address was agent@ukex11.pur3.net and the from address was
Some companies now insist on filing any "email" contact with them in a tiny web-form, which I don't think really is fair to really call email. This means we don't have a copy of the "email" in our "Sent" folder with the rest of our email, and we have no record that we have contacted the company though the tiny web-form, so when they don't reply we don't have a copy of what we sent them or any proof.
Often the web-forms will have bugs, like a 255 character limit, or a silly set of blocked characters which includes question marks and commas.
Got another one today saying "
So, any companies reading this.. switch back to standard email, and provide good customer service!
Labels: email
Saturday, 28 July 2007
Why email is better than forums
The crux of this post is that unfortunately there has been a wave of replacing these established Conversation protocols with a "Forum". Where a forum is a web-based conversation system which does not interact with existing Conversation software like Outlook or Thunderbird etc.
Forums use a custom format per implementation, and store their Conversation records in a centralised location in a custom format incompatible with other Conversation systems or even other Forums. This change has been a shame, because we have lost the flexibility we had. And don't forget, people can browse email conversations online in a web-browser in just the same way that a Forum can be browsed.
One thing that would be handy is if when we join a discussion mailing list, we could also search the archive of the mailing list direct from our conversation software.
In the meantime, I'm going to save my time, and stick to email mailing lists
Labels: email
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