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Labelmaker!
As I’ve written before, we now live in the Turing age. Every time we open our email boxes, we’re forced to conduct dozens of Turing tests, trying to quickly figure out which of the pieces of email are from real humans, and which were sent by spambots.
This battle has now claimed its first linguistic casualty. It occurred to me yesterday that you can no longer send an email to anyone with the sole word “hello” in the message header.
Why? Because the email recipient is almost certain to throw out your email before reading it. And why would they do that? Because the MyDoom virus has been flooding our inboxes with endless copies of itself, half of which say merely “hi” or “hello” in the message field. I personally have been getting between 20 and 60 copies of MyDoom every day for the last two weeks. So as I go through my email every day, numbly disposing of the 70 to 80 per cent of which is spam (and I get about 300 messages a day), I’m almost certain to throw out anything with “hi” or “hello”.
The other day, I got an email from a friend saying, hey, did you get the email I sent you last week? And I hadn’t. I didn’t remember reading anything from him. He insisted he’d sent me an email, so I asked him, hey, just out of interest, what did you put in the message line? Oh, I said “hello,” he replied.
Heh. That’s the problem. These days, saying “hello” and “hi” instantly and definitively marks you as a spambot. I, and most other people on the Net, will immediately delete your mail and won’t even waste the microsecond necessary to glance over to see which email address the email has come from.
So here’s a tip for anyone who’s trying to email me. If you want to appear human-like, put a human-like message header on your email. And that means you can’t say just “hello” or “hi,” because that no longer qualifies as a human-like message.
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
New technique renders objects at sea “invisible” to waves of water
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North Dakota the most outgoing state, according to study of “the geography of personality”
» visit the Collision Detection archives
September 26, 2008 » 01:57 PM
From an interview with ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis:
One of the cultures you celebrate in Light at the Edge of the World is the Inuit. What do you most admire about them?
Davis: The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That’s when what they call the “shit knife” took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.
September 25, 2008 » 11:21 AM
“Video from a camp north of Toronto in December 2005 shows a car spinning around in a nearby, snow-covered parking lot. Prosecutors characterized that as special driver training but the defense, and many outsiders, said it was nothing more than “cutting doughnuts,” a favorite winter pastime of young Canadian motorists.” - A key piece of evidence submitted in the trial of a gang of alleged young Canadian terrorists.
September 24, 2008 » 11:21 PM
“Life imitates art imitating life: just thought a gnat crawling across my monitor was part of a Flash-based ad. I clicked it.” - A Tweet from Bill Braine.
September 24, 2008 » 02:37 PM
“Funniest FB friend request ever: “Twitter friend hoping to get to second base (Facebook!) ;-).”” - A recent Tweet by Pistachio
September 24, 2008 » 12:28 PM
Chinese powdered-milk crisis creates a new market: The return of the wet nurse
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