On Monday, February 2, 2004, 1:27:45 PM, Miles Johnson wrote: MJ> Deborah did you, yourself READ that newsletter and the one(s) that MJ> addressed this "from an unknown name & address" issue?
Yes, I did. MJ> What Langa did was just an experiment, and a very important one. MJ> Yes, the results are scary, but they that's not his doing, it's MJ> merely a snapshot of what's going on right now. That's where I disagree. First, the headline didn't accurately reflect the claims in the article. Secondly, the claims weren't borne out by the stats - if he didn't get replies from 40%, that doesn't mean that 40% of his emails weren't received. At best, it says that 20% weren't received, & that he didn't receive 20% of the replies. (We could get further into more complicated statistical analysis, that's just the first blow.) Third, he didn't accept replies - people actually had to forward them to a certain address. Given how good most people are at following instructions, I figure a good lot of people didn't do what he asked. That proves nothing about email, it only speaks to people's ability to read & do what they're asked. MJ> People can argue over the percentages all they want, but I can MJ> confirm that more and more of my email does NOT get delivered. I've not noticed much email go astray at all - I had trouble getting an email to two people during the last bout of viruses, but my emails to both bounced. I've not had even a single episode of someone saying "I didn't get that email from you" or of me not getting an email someone sent to me - and I get thousands of emails a week. If a full 40% of emails really didn't get to the recipient, nobody would be using email at all, it would simply be too unreliable. If your phone only called the number you dialled on 6/10 occasions, would you ever bother to phone anyone? MJ> And it doesn't matter what software you use. TB is a lot better MJ> than many others, It does matter what ISP you use though - many of them have very stupid rules about what they'll allow through. AOL springs to mind <G> MJ> but we are facing a very, very serious problem here with BOTH the MJ> spammers and those idiotic "challenge-based" solutions. Yes, they are idiotic, & really only suitable for people who don't actually want to get any email at all. Not sure who they'd be LOL. But my beef with Langa is that his claims just don't hold water - see the number of people on his forum who, when they found out what his emails said, dug them out of their spam-traps. As one of the participants there said, what he's proved is that 60% of people will open an email with a generic subject-line, from a person they've never heard of - now *that's* scary. MJ> But this is getting a bit OT, isn't it? Yep. Shall we move to TBOT? -- Deborah I'm in shape. Round is a shape. ________________________________________________ Current version is 2.02.3 CE | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
