Don’t Send This to Your Friends
As I start to write this week's article, I sign in to my Bilkent email
account and see that Lupe Blackman (whom I've never heard of) wants to
tell me about Nanoforce Inc., Enrique Green is offering me the
opportunity to be "the biggest among all my friends" (I'm sure you can
decipher this phrase by using your "spam mail vocabulary"), and Theresa
Sheppard has written me a reply even though I've never written to her (if
we can call a cyberbot "her").
As we all know, since email began replacing traditional mail, faxes and
telephone calls, it has gained immense importance. These days, lots of
people communicate with their friends and relatives by email. Huge
corporations use internal email services in order to ensure effective
communication between different departments and offices within their
companies. Here at Bilkent, many student clubs have mail groups to share
ideas and news about club events. I personally send my Bilkent News
articles to the Communications Unit Coordinator by email and use the
internet
to communicate with people about graphic design orders as well.
We Bilkent students also find email extremely important for another
reason: most of our instructors use the internet to communicate with us.
They send class notes, announcements and grades via email. If we miss an
email sent by an instructor (or accidentally delete it), it might mean
that we won't have the notes for a chapter, won't hear about an
assignment (and most probably won't be able to hand it in on time), or
won't know the exact place or date of an exam.
I don't expect Lupe, Enrique or Theresa to be aware of how they mess up
our Bilkent inboxes with their meaningless trash, because these three--and
the thousands of others like them--do not exist. Undoubtedly, the
creators of these imaginary characters will continue to try to promote
their dubious products via spam emails.
But there are solutions for the junk mail problem, which are used by
mail servers such as Yahoo! and Google. Although I'm not familiar with
the technical details of how it's done, I know that it's possible to
create a pool of spam email addresses in the system and block them all.
It seems to me like we Bilkenters need such a solution so we can use our
mailboxes without getting several useless emails per day. Junk mail
takes up our time, impedes communication between us and our instructors
and wastes our limited space on the Bilkent servers.
I'm sure the BCC is skillful enough to solve such a a simple problem,
just like they've solved many others before this. I do realize that
they’ve tried to block the spammers before.
The BCC’s webpage states that they’ve “stopped automatically blocking
spammer sites” because it caused some innocent e-mail addresses which
are “using the same e-mail servers with the spammers” to be blocked*.
But we know that neither Yahoo! nor Gmail blocks any of our innocent
friends. And this indicates that it must be possible to establish a
system that would let Bilkenters use their Bilkent accounts without
encountering Viagra ads.
*http://knuth.ug.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr/spammers/spammers.html
Ýsmail O. Postalcýoðlu (POLS/III)
ismail_orhan@yahoo.com
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