Today, due to circumstances beyond my control, my outbound e-mail has been tagged as "spam" by one or more major e-mail providers. Consequently, until I can prove that I'm not a spam generator, many of my e-mails are being blocked.
I can't tell who thinks I'm spam and who doesn't until I get a bounceback e-mail, but it is a rather humbling experience--an indictment on my communication habits. My approach to e-mail historically has been to (a) have a thought, (b) commit that thought to digital data and (c) click on "send." My thought then becomes someone else's problem--until, of course, someone somewhere says "Enough!" and cuts me off. On days like these I realize that one person's epiphanies are very often another person's irritants.
Beyond the obvious benefits to necessary communication, e-mail as I've approached it--along with blogging, I think--is often equal parts an attempt to be known and a desire to be admired. As such, it can be pretty addictive. You want to be known by more and more people, and so you monitor the profile views on your profile, despairing when the count stays static and congratulating yourself when it reaches some new round number. You compare the comment count from one post to another and from your blog to another's, and thusly you measure your relative worth. Meanwhile, people with their own problems are surfing the Internet, minding their own business and either allow themselves to get drawn into your search for significance or throw their guard up and say, "Please don't bother me!"
Anyway, my experience as spam has left me plenty circumspect, so I will simply say: thanks for coming by my blog. I hope you have fun here more often than you get annoyed. And if my presumed profundities ever bug you, please don't flag me as inappropriate. Instead, please post a comment to let me know; you get the annoyance off your chest, and my fragile sense of self-worth gets bolstered by another comment. Everybody wins.
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3 comments:
"Well ya know, for me, the action is the juice."
I was just contemplating writing a post on community and having 'blogging buddies' and how, weirdly enough, blogging creates a unique community, and I use that term loosely because I know there are different meanings out there, more so than IRC or any of the other communication methods that are out there.
My own editorial on the blacklists is that in the days of forged e-mail, spam and the like, I think blacklists are unecessarily draconian and shouldn't be used by anyone that even remotely wants to run a professional shop.
Most of them boil down to someone complaining that they got a spam e-mail from bob@gmail.com when in fact they really got an e-mail from some low-life in Georgia who got a list from someone in Thailand and who will use that e-mail list to steal information from others.
Meanwhile, poor bob gets blacklisted when he didn't do anything wrong. They (the blacklist agencies) mean well, they just aren't that useful.
Re: Dave's Paragraph 2
Augh! How embarrassing! How did you KNOW? (By which I mean, I pretty much ditto all that.)
But look. A comment and a confession all rolled into one. How convenient.
Hey. We want more spam. ("Spam, spam, spam, spam and spam.") What, are you on vacation or something?
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