The New York Times, today, reports that Verizon Wireless (my mobile provider), is about to allow ads on their mobile phone screens.
Exactly what we all wanted, right? Not even close. We are already bombarded daily with generally useless, irrelevant advertising. Plus, this method of stuff-it-down-your-throat advertising is SO 1990’s.
I was disappointed to read this on my NY Times RSS feed this morning and was happy to see this articulate response posted on one of my favorite blogs.
Read it here (especially if you work for Verizon or care to keep your cellphone ad free).
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December 26th, 2006
Well, I won’t be having spam for Thanksgiving because I am currently a Vegan (don’t ask). Not that I would be having spam for Thanksgiving anyway. But, what this post is referring to is not the delicious “meat” in a can, but the incredible amount of junk mail that I and our business have been receiving lately. I am literally getting a junk message every 2-5 minutes (Apple’s built-in Mail.app Junk Filter is getting completely worked).
In addition, our email messages have not been sending properly. So, I called up our hosting provider, Media Temple and tried to figure out the problem. They informed me that junk mail is up 80% this month alone and this is causing their servers to be overwhelmed. I am not sure if the 80% increase stat is correct, but I would not be surprised. CNET reports that mass-emailers typically bump up their production of spam mail during the holiday season. This year is slated to be worse than ever before.
In October, 63 billion junk messages were sent daily, on average, compared with 31 billion a year ago, according to data from IronPort Systems. IronPort predicts that the number of spam messages will average 78 billion a day in December, up from 38 billion last year.
CNET ” ‘Tis the season to send spam” 11/20/06
It seems that you either have to have an industrial strength spam filter and have false positives or deal with all of the junk. There does not seem to be a good solution, at this time. If you know of a great spam filter for Mac OS X, please let me know!
Hey Google, if you can hear me, please put a free version of your GMail spam filter, that we can use with Mail.app, under my Christmas tree this year.
Update (12/6/06): The New York Times reports on this same issue today. The situation does not look like it is getting much better anytime soon. I wonder if any of these spammers are supported by the anti-spam companies that now have an even “better” climate to hawk their filtration systems? Another conspiracy theory for another time.
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November 22nd, 2006