The Effect of Spammers on Housewarming Party Invitations
For years, when I’ve wanted to announce a party, I’d send it to me, and bcc everyone else. That prevented people hitting reply without looking, and spamming the whole invite list with “hey! haven’t heard from you in a while!”
Well, we’re having a housewarming party two weekends hence, on October 4th. And I realized if I tried that method, the invite would slip silently into dozens of spam filters and we’d be left sitting alone with a lot of hummus.
So I laboriously emailed the invite dozens of times, grouping some together — couple, or groups of friends — people who already know each others’ email addresses and wouldn’t get too upset about an inadvertent reply-all.
And it’s done now, I think. If you’re reading this and you’ll be near Berkeley on the 4th and you think you should be invited, you’re probably right. Let me know.
I can sympathize. I've lost a few personal e-mails to over-enthusiastic spam filtering.
No way I can make it out to California by the 4th, so accept my best wishes long-distance.
Posted by Jimcat on September 24 2003 05:27
Hmmmm... At the risk of sounding like a hopeless luddite, it occurs to me you could have resorted to old-style postal mailing of the invitations, thus avoiding the spam/filter problems altogether. Imagine the shock from your friends as they receive a hard-copy invitation from you!
Posted by CT on September 24 2003 21:55
CT may have a good point there. The latest report I read said that spam accounts for 50% of all e-mail sent, and that percentage is still rising. Faced with that, maybe people will decide it's better to go back to snail mail? At least the spam detection and deletion system is more reliable.
Posted by Jimcat on September 25 2003 05:38
what is this
Posted by spencer ewald on September 25 2003 08:25
heh. No advantage, Costas -- then I'd have had to email all my friends asking them for their postal addresses.
Posted by Zed on September 25 2003 10:15
hm, postal email would have sat in this huge pile of ignored stuff on my living room table, unread for months.
Posted by Scanner on September 26 2003 16:33
Only Scanner would refer to good old fashioned paper communication as "postal email". (-:
Posted by Jimcat on September 26 2003 17:07