I got a phishing email that would have just been lame, except it pretended to come from a company I do business with. I wasn’t fooled, but I had to take tens of seconds out of my day to check.
Things should be better. I propose a joint FBI-NSA task force to track down phishers and render them to the US for prosecution.
Mail.app glitched so that some of my inbox messages were no longer correctly associated with their headers. Rebuilding the inbox failed to fix it, so yesterday I moved everything into a new mailbox called “Damaged Inbox.”
By that simple expedient, I have achieved Inbox Zero, and have maintained that state for a solid 12 hours.
I used to love email. I still do, except so few people use it any more.
I used to use email almost like people use text messages now. I’d write little, one-topic messages and send them to one (or a few) people. Most of the people I exchanged email with had their email on for most of the day, so they’d get the message in just a few minutes and then be able to respond (or not, if they didn’t want to). If they (or I) didn’t want to be available to be contacted for a period of time, it was easy to put the computer to sleep, or turn off email notifications.
It was also easy to get a little more fancy than that. For example, I often set my email client to check email every hour or every half-hour, instead of the default of every few minutes. I was still able to be responsive to people who sent me email, but I wasn’t constantly interrupted by random notifications from random sources.
That’s half of what I’d like to be able to get my phone to do—batch up alerts, and then give them to me on a schedule that I pick.
The other half is to shut up about telling anybody else about what I’m doing. My email didn’t send any information back to people, except the information I told it to send back. (Sure, my mail server knew when I was connecting and from what IP address, but it kept that information to itself.)
If I was going batch up notifications so that I’d only get them every hour anyway, I’d like my phone to disconnect from the network for the 59 minutes in between. There’s no need for anybody, including Verizon and Google, to know where I am in between.
(Of course if I get my phone out to check something I’d like it to quickly connect to the network so it can do so, but that technology works just fine.)
I could almost do that by just turning my phone off for 59 minutes and then turning it back on, except that obviously doesn’t do the trick unless I carry around another timing device to remind me every hour that I want to turn the phone back on. Plus it’s a lot of fiddling around for the hours in which I don’t receive any notifications (not that there are very many of those).
Admittedly, all kinds of things are made easier by being always connected, such as the ability to prioritize a handful of alerts to come immediately—phone calls, text messages from intimates, tornado warnings, etc. But for me, the mental model of email was vastly preferable to the stupid array of alerts I’ve got now.
At some point in the last few years, presumably related to my writing for Wise Bread, a whole bunch of PR flacks started sending me their press releases—mostly about money stuff, with a little writing stuff and journalism stuff thrown in.
It has been very tedious, but I have hesitated to mark these messages as spam, because the topics are things that interest me (even if the actually email messages are almost never of any interest whatsoever).
After spending a year or two just deleting all that crap manually, I’ve spent a few minutes today making a filter that grabs that stuff and puts it in a folder called “Lame PR” so I don’t have it cluttering up my inbox.
So far I’m sorting by sender, because I think there are only about a dozen senders behind the majority of this crap. Maybe I’m mistaken. There may be too many senders. But I doubt if they’re doing the spammer tricks to make this stuff hard to filter. (They’re hoping that I find their “content” so useful, I’ll be using filters to make sure I do see their content!)
Once I get them filtered out, my inbox will be much more useful than it has been.
I’m with Cory Doctorow here: Keeping an email address secret won’t hide it from spambots.
When I had to change email addresses a couple of years back, I considered not posting the new address on my site, to keep the spambots from harvesting it. (My previous email address had been published before there even was spam, so keeping it secret from spammers had never been an option.)
In the end, though, I decided—just as Cory has—that there’s no point. The benefits are very small (the spammers will get your email address anyway), and the costs are significant (all your correspondants have to go through extra work to track down and de-obfuscate your email address).
In the end I did make one concession to the spambots. My email address is no longer in the footer of every page, the way it used to be. Now it just appears in my “contact” page (linked to from the sidebar). That hides it from the very most lazy spambots (which seems to be a large fraction of them). But my email address is right there as a clickable mailto link. Not obfuscated. Not presented as an image. Not hidden behind a contact form.
If you’ve got something you want to say to me, send me some email!
Zen Habits has a fresh post up on becoming Google-free. It’s a pretty good look at the key resources that Google provides—Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Picasa, etc.—and for each one provides Leo’s choice for a replacement, along with mentioning a few other alternatives.
On the one hand, this is just the sort of thing I’m a bit too prone to worry about. For me, security, privacy, and reliability are right up there with functionality. On the other hand, it had scarcely crossed my mind that I’m so reliant on Google that becoming Google-free was an important issue. So, seeing Leo’s article prompted me to give it some thought.
To me, the more fundamental issue is choosing to keep your data on your own hardware or to keep it in the cloud.
It used to be that the cloud was a loser on all four issues (security, privacy, reliability, functionality). In just the past few years, the cloud has made great strides in the latter two. I haven’t seen a careful analysis, but my sense now is that the cloud is about as reliable as your own hardware, albeit with different failure modes (less chance of a bad disk drive losing a bunch of data, more chance of the provider deprecating the tool or simply going bust). Functionality is a different kind of question—all you care about is whether the tool provides the functionality you need—but my sense again is that tools like Google Docs do fine at providing the most important functionality.
On issues of security and privacy, though, it seems to me that the cloud can never win. Well, maybe in one narrow sense: Servers in the cloud can be professionally managed with security in mind, so there’s a better chance that security patches will be applied promptly and less chance that they’ll be configured in an insecure way out of carelessness or ignorance. Except for that, though, all the cloud can offer is an unenforceable promise of security and privacy—and it rarely offers even that.
Because of that, I’ve always ended up choosing to keep mission-critical work on my own hardware. I use various cloud services, but they’re all in some way either publishing or else secondary.
Where what I’m doing is publishing (such as this blog, my account on Flickr, my account on Twitter, and so on), the privacy issues are moot—I’m explicitly making the stuff public. I still care about security, but my security interests are closely aligned with the provider’s security interests, so I feel reasonably comfortable relying on the provider to get security right.
All my uses of cloud-provided tools are non-critical. I have a Gmail account, but it’s a backup account for use when my main email account is unavailable for some reason. I have a Google Docs account, but I only use it occasionally to view a Word document or make a graph with the spreadsheet facility. I don’t use Google Calendar (I use iCal). The one Google tool that I’d really miss if it disappeared is Google Reader which I use every day, but even losing that wouldn’t be a catastrophe. I could go back to reading blogs on the websites themselves (!) until I picked out a new RSS feed reader. My latest backup of my subscriptions was really old (I just now grabbed a current one), but I’d be able to recreate the important ones easily enough.
The upshot is that going Google-free seems to be a non-issue to me. I could do it in five minutes and scarcely feel the loss. I’m glad to have been prompted to think about it, though.
