Troutblog

Email in America is broken.  Here’s what’s happened:

Spammers have flooded the email distribution chain, and people do not want unsolicited email so….

First we had personal filters available through our email providers. Which allowed us, as individuals to choose what email we wanted to allow through.

However, our email providers, over-burdened by the amount of spam being circulated (not to mention viruses and other malware), which THEY must filter before delivering to you –  have turned to outside filtering agencies, who maintain blacklists, that prevent suspect email from ever reaching your email provider.  In theory, a good idea, except now,  you, the individual, have no say as to whether you want that email to reach you — because even your email provider never receives it!

The idea behind these blacklists was to take “known spammers” – based on the IP addresses they use – out of the email chain.  HOWEVER, spammers frequently leave a blacklisted server, and move on to a new IP address to spew their unwanted mail.   And what happens to abandoned IP addresses?  They get recycled and used by new organizations!

So guess what happens?  If YOU are using a server that has an IP address FORMERLY used by a spammer…. then your IP address, the source of  your email is now on the blacklist.  And your email no longer gets through.

Now, I’m not a spammer. And I use godaddy.com as my email provider.  But their blacklist provider is blocking email that I need to receive.  So, I don’t get their emails. It just can’t reach me even if I turn off ANY personal junk mail-screening at godaddy.  (Because GoDaddy never gets the email.  It’s blocked before it gets there!)

Worse yet, I can’t count on MY email being received either?   Other ISPs are blocking email sent by me through GoDaddy’s servers — because they think the mail server GoDaddy is using is a spammer source.  (I have to figure this out, and get GoDaddy to actively get whatever server they have me on removed from whichever blacklist is blocking it.)

So some of my emails don’t reach my customers.  (I cannot send email to Inland Empire United Way for example). It’s always blocked by a blacklist.

Can you get off a blacklist?  Yes. But it’s hard, hard work.  And too technical for the average user who just knows that they aren’t getting all their emails and that all their emails aren’t necessarily being received.  I’ve tried to get this resolved at both ends (sending server and receiving server), and just given up.  I’ve devoted hours to this. Hours!!!  Too much work.

Which means:

You can no longer trust email to work.

Troutco Predicts: This situation will continue to worsen, and in 3 years, email will be sufficiently unreliable to the point that we’ll have to find other solutions to commnicate.

Anyone care to speculate on what will become the next mode of communication when email goes the way of faxes  (only used by people who no longer are keeping up with technology)?

(This is one of many reasons people are using twitter these days!  Especially for communicating to groups of people!)  But Twitter will never be a replacement for email.  At least not in its current form.  Would welcome comments on what you think the real solution might be here.

FYI: Here’s an Email Blacklist Check site, where you can see if YOUR server is on one of 147 DNS based email blacklists.  Have fun.

Find out the latest stats on Volunteering in America. This terrific site features detailed multi-year information on volunteering trends and demographics in all 50 states, U.S. regions and several cities, and it ranks states and large and mid-size cities on volunteer rates.

The Web site allows users to explore the information in great detail and pull data from specific cities. The report is based on research and thousands of surveys from the U.S. Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was just updated this week with data from 2008 surveys.  See how your city rates! (And don’t forget to volunteer!)

More than anything else, Public Enemies is about looking good. The camerawork is digital and full of rich shadow, Johnny Depp looks stylish and amazing (even his scar looks good!) The army of G-Men are impeccably dressed, and every period car is glistening and shiny black. Obviously the great depression was a time when everyone and everything looked their best. Never has so much marble been lovingly photographed. (For authenticity sake a few bums are occasionally found lounging in the corners of shots, but they are in best ‘bum’ clothing!) Seriously, it’s great seeing this many people in suits and fedoras. This is Period with a capital P. (For Pretty!)

It’s also as anesthetic as a museum. While I enjoyed watching the film with its wonderfully staged machine gun fights and bank heists — it all felt, well…. beautifully done. There was little chutzpah to it. The central love story was perfunctory and rote. The many gangsters and G-men in the story were largely indistinguishable from one another (other than Depp who as always, has charisma to burn, and Christian Bale who does an interesting job of channeling a bit of Robert Duvall to his usual intensity.)

When the film ended after two and a half hours, I felt pleasure at seeing all this attractively shot stuff, but I doubt I’ll remember anything about any of it by tomorrow.

OK. Here’s what I’ll remember. I’ve never seen closer, close-up photography than this. Every single pore of Johnny Depp’s and Marion Cotillard’s faces fill the screen in amazing detail. I’ve never spent so much time gazing deeply at skin details.

The script DOES brush with a few interesting ideas and themes — like the fact that Dillinger was unwilling to adapt to advances in technology (the FBI’s hi-tech bank of phone switching and recording gear is worth a chuckle when viewed from 2009 — oooh) and that Dillinger couldn’t embrace that you could make more money taking bets over the phone than you could by robbing banks. The crimes they are a changin’.

These reverberations to today could have made an interesting theme to build the movie around — but ultimately Mann seems more interested in the romance of crime, the devotion of true love, and making sure every hat, gun and eyebrow was exquisitely placed and photographed!

Robots! Big robots! Teeny robots! Shiny cars! Monster Trucks! Fireballs! Super swirly camera moves! Hot babes! Thundering music! Cool dudes! Explosions! Tanks! Megan! Evil robots! Funny people! Machine guns! Motorcycles! Ass jokes! Slo-mo camera moves! Shia! Noble robots! Big moist lips! Ghetto robots! Jets! Fast talking! Army guys! Bitches! Billowing smoke! Thunderous music! Friggin cussing! Air craft carriers! Pyramids! Car crashes! Partyin’! Paris! Outerspace robots! Dog! Goofy robots! Mechanical clanks and whirs! A government stooge! Hit-in-the-head jokes! Hit-in-the ballsack jokes! Chases! Flying robots! Swimming robots! Blow torches! Jeeps! Big tires! Flying rubble! 2 hours 30 minutes!