OS/2 e-Zine! - Chris' Rant

Chris' Rant - by Chris Wenham

Thank you, Monty Python

In February's column I happened to provide a pointer to an IBM press release on Microsoft's web site that said some very flattering things about OS/2. A couple of days after the e-Zine! column was published, the document mysteriously vanished in a puff of 404 errors. Good golly, I didn't know Big Bad Microsoft (tm) was so afraid of little me (oh, and before you remark about the PC Week column by Peter Coffee that mentions the same URL, I got mail on Feb. 27th alerting me that Microsoft had yanked the page, and Peter's column is dated a week later on March 3rd, so nyah!)

Well guess what, folks? It's baaaaack! Except this time Microsoft just couldn't keep their meddling paws to themselves and decided to respond to it with a few [lies, damn lies] and statistics from Mentis Corporation too. I could possibly believe Microsoft's sincerity a little more if it wasn't for the fact that the press release was dated July 23, 1996. If it takes 8 months for them to reply to a simple piece of PR, maybe this explains their software release schedule.

My real gripe for this month is just a wee bit unrelated to OS/2 but is worth talking about anyway. Junk e-mailers have decided they're going to use the e-mail account you pay for as their advertising medium and they apparently don't give a damn what you think about it.

Unsolicited junk e-mail is cheap y'see, that's the draw; it's infinitely cheaper than using the traditional mail service which still costs 32 cents (US) per letter for first class no matter how many you send at a time. So far this advertising medium hasn't drawn many respectable businesses, but it has drawn an incredible number of fly-by-night con artists interested in selling you pyramid schemes, mail-order scams, more bulk spam lists or the software that generates them.

The problems you have to suffer with are now mounting. For example, a junkie sending out bulk spam will offer to remove your address from his mailing list if you reply to the message and type "REMOVE" in the subject line. The problem is, the junk-mailer has already faked the message header with a phony origin (I once got mail from "whodat@secretsender.com") so your request won't go anywhere. If the return address is valid, or they give you a different address to reply to somewhere in the body of the message, you'll probably find that the junk mailer is so dishonest he won't even comply with your request when he gets it. But what you've just done for him is verify your account is still active -- allowing him to sell your address to another spammer for a premium.

That's pretty low.

My advice is not to consider purchasing any product or service advertised through an unsolicited e-mail. A company that abuses e-mail this way is unlikely to be one you can trust. They have already proved that they don't care if you have to pay by the minute to download their junk, and they probably wouldn't care if you complained or asked to be taken off their mailing lists either. Why should they deserve your business?

I've played around with the filtering capabilities of PMMail to try to screen out this stuff; the problem is that most filters don't seem to be sophisticated enough without having to write a REXX script. As a suggestion to the authors of OS/2 e-mail clients, how about putting some good (but optional) spambuster filters in there?

I have the feeling it will be a long time before the junk-mail industry ever gets around to cleaning up its act. Until then, I guess we all just have to grin and [delete] it.

Chris Wenham is a Team OS/2er in Binghamton, NY with a catchy-titled company -- Wenham's Web Works. He has written comedy, sci-fi, HTML, Pascal, C++ and now writes software reviews.

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