Tag: email

Society by Joe WilcoxSep 26, 20168:32 am

I’m Mad! Some Dude is using My Gmail to open Dating and Deal Site Accounts!

Question: “When is stupidity fraud?” I ask because someone is using my gmail address to sign up for a humungous number of newsletters and websites. At first, I presumed someone trolled me. But that no longer appears to be the case. This guy, presumably living in North Carolina, either uses my address randomly to hide his identity, or he mistypes one that is similar. Given many of the services are for an unidentified widower looking for love, I assume the latter.

Behind my question are real concerns about identity and privacy that do not just apply to me. The email address gives me the ability to change the passwords and even cancel accounts—both of which I have done, treating his misuse of my email address as identity theft and violations of my privacy; after years of careful cultivation that reduced spam, crap is on the rise as this misuse spreads my gmail identity across dating and discount sites and sex webcams. Who knows on what mailing lists it will appear next. But over the past 24 hours, the amount of spam offers, like being paid to take surveys, exploded. The email address may be permanently ruined for personal and professional purposes.

Politics by Joe WilcoxFeb 15, 20066:34 pm

Secretaries Don’t E-Mail

In March 2004, I appeared on PBS Newshour to discuss the European Union’s antitrust case against Microsoft. But I was by no means star of the night. The news show featured an interview face-off between Jim Lehrer and U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. I sat in another area of the same studio watching the Secretary answer Jim’s questions—well, sidestep many of them. The Defense Secretary struck me as out of touch, a sense I got more seeing him live than I ever have on television.

But even I underestimated just how out of touch is Donald Rumsfeld. Today, Newsweek columnist Mark Hosenball writes about the Karina hearings: “Congressional investigations of government responses to Hurricane Katrina have revealed that two of the nation’s key crisis managers, the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, do not use e-mail”.

Uh, yeah.

Web by Joe WilcoxFeb 9, 20068:24 pm

You Want to Charge for What?

I am not swooping with excitement over AOL and Yahoo plans to charge for e-mail. Here’s how I see it: 1) Spam is bad enough without e-mail vendors making it easier. 2) Charging for e-mail fundamentally changes the way the Internet has long operated.

The way it works: Marketers would pay a penny to directly route their e-mails to inboxes, bypassing spam filters. The marketers that pay get their e-mail separated from those that don’t pay and from the riffraff. Maybe, but I don’t want any of their mail. It’s pretty much all spam to me, and I waste way too much trudging through it.