A Minor Journey dot com.

Is it just me, or has the effectiveness of email diminished of late?

Since spam became a common rather than uncommon occurrence in your inbox it seems that more and more companies (and third party solutions) are jumping on the bandwagon to solve the problem of spam.

Don’t get me wrong. I hate it when my inbox is full of stuff offering to make my boobs bigger or perhaps even offering to enlarge things I don’t own - but I do expect emails to reach me intact from people who have actually sat down and written me a message rather than bots who just want to take up bandwidth and launch viruses and malware on unsuspecting end-users.

So anyway - my personal anti-spam solution is to push all my email (from multiple addresses) through Google Mail. It seems to tackle most spam head-on. The result is that I do get very little spam. Occasionally the spam filter catches the odd email by mistake but I can live with that.

What I can’t live with, however, is the companies and institutions (read schools here), who block email at their server from anyone who isn’t on their approved list of legitimate, non-spam email addresses.

That is fine if you want to block malicious email from reaching a system and you’re operating a closed email loop for inter-departmental communication. I’ve worked in several positions where you are only allowed to send email to other departments using a special email address. That’s fine.

But when the institution in question blocks all incoming email from the outside world unless it’s been approved by the system admins as being non-spam email becomes almost impossible to use. Setting up an email system in which all mail is considered spam until it is excepted from the rule by adding to a white list rather than assuming all mail is safe until it’s sender is on a known black list is a great way of ensuring that no-one gets spam. But it’s a stupid way of running email.

Let’s see the scenarios:

1) A client (or parent in this case) wishes to email the school about their child. Telephoning and leaving a message is becoming a very difficult way of reaching teachers, especially if they aren’t based in a particular room and have very infrequent free periods, so email is considered by many to be quicker and more fruitful. The parent sends the message, which doesn’t get through. They either think the school is ignoring them or perhaps can’t get in touch any other way - except perhaps writing a letter. Letters are fine, but then there’s the question as to if the letter actually gets delivered.

So, email is relied on, but the sender doesn’t get told their email hasn’t been read. The message never gets through.

2) A visiting teacher emails through timetables for the semester. They don’t work at the school permanently so are only there for a few hours a week. To travel to the school every time they need to communicate with a colleague at the school would take up a lot of valuable time. Emailing paperwork seems to be a good idea.

A timetable is emailed and a week later, when the teacher visits the school they find out that the email hasn’t got through because of the strict anti-spam measures. The email hasn’t been kept and hasn’t even made it to the colleague’s spam folder because everything is rejected at the gateway unless it’s known to be from a trusted sender. Worse still, the sender hasn’t been told that the email has bounced or been rejected (standard practice when your email doesn’t get through).

The teacher visits and wonders why no students turn up for class. A wasted morning ensues.

So, in the future the teacher at the school is forced to give out their private email address for communications to both parents and colleagues. Is that a way to run an email system?

In case you haven’t guessed, I was the victim of scenario 2. I did a twenty-mile round trip yesterday to discover that my timetable hadn’t got through.

Email isn’t my friend right now…..

How does one ensure an email gets through? Perhaps my host company (1and1) sends spam and is on the blacklist?

I can’t let this happen. It’s one thing for my email to go missing if it’s something that I’m doing for fun or in my spare time but when it’s my business I really need reliable email..

Gah…