I have an email address book with lots of people I've worked with over the years. Occasionally, I'll remember someone in there and send them a "Hi, how's it going?" note just to keep in touch. If I don't get a reply, and it had been a particularly long time since I'd communicated with that person, I figured their email address had changed or something.
Lately it seems more of my notes have disappeared into the ether, and I think the explosion in spam is to blame. Either the recipients have mis-configured spam filters, or they just didn't recognize my name and tossed a note with a subject line like "Hello" or "Greetings". Sometimes I wonder if I've done that myself.
Been there done that
jdavidboyd on 2003-06-20T15:34:47
I tried to get it touch with a buddy of mine for 15 years after I was out of the Air Force. All I had was his old home town and his name. Over the years I would call information and try to track him down. Went nowhere.
One day I got an email with the subject "I finally tracked you down."
Sounded like spam to me, but just something about his email address sounded vaguely familiar, so I happened to open it instead of bit-bucketing it.
Was I glad I hadn't trashed it.
I'm sure huge amounts of email gets thrown away because of spam.
Steve Ciarcia, in his last editorial in
Circuit Cellar magazine, says that he request people that write to him to have distinctive, as obviously as possible non-spam subject lines so that he will actually read their messages instead of throwing them away.
