[conspire] Yet another way the world's changed

[Rick Moen]

We had a small but fun CABAL meeting last night!  Unless your name was
Bruce Coston or you were a resident of my house, you missed good food
and a couple of good movies, but better luck next time.  And, inshallah,
we might be able to move outdoors again starting Saturday, April 8..

Reminder:  There will be NO March 11 (next Saturday) CABAL meeting.  
March's CABAL meeting is accessible only via TARDIS.


I mentioned last week that there are times you suddenly realise that the
world has quietly changed.  Today, I was reminded of another example:

I maintain a mailing list for former employees of Linuxcare, Inc., of
San Francisco, asa way we alumni can keep in touch.  Occcasionally, I 
find that someone's subscribed address has become undeliverable, and ask
around for that person's new address if anyone knows it.  And one of
these recently came up for my friend and one-time co-worker Andrew Scott
whose (subscribed) ascott at tathata.org address times out.  Turns out,
although Andrew still owns tathata.org, it no longer does SMTP mail.

Asking around, we re-found Andrew's mail presence, at a GMail address.  
Good, done.  Now, we know we're reaching Andrew again.  Or do we?


At issue is yet another way the world has changed.  Used to be, you
could be 95% confident you were still reaching someone's live,
human-monitored mailbox if SMTP delivery were successful.  It was never
100%, because all you really knew for certain was that your mail reached
a destination SMTP server addressed to an account that recently reached
your correspondent.  The correspondent could be failing to bother
picking up mail or shuffling it off to a disregarded mailbox.  But it
was a pretty reliable sign.

Why?  Because keeping an SMTP address deliverable used to cost money, 
and mailboxes used to have size limits.  If you stopped paying for a
POP3/IMAP account, it got switched off (resulting in 550 5.5.1 Not our
customer SMTP error code).  If you ceased picking up mail, your SMTP
mailbox would reach maximum allowed size (resulting in 550 5.2.1
Mailbox quota exceeded SMTP error code).

But now the world has changed, because of (a) webmail funded by
advertising and data-mining, and (b) effectively unlimited data storage
for mail.

Used to be, in maintaining my dead-tree address book, certain people
moved residences, changed telephone numbers, or changed e-mail addresses
so frequently I called them the 'pencil people', in that I found I
needed to maintain their entries using erasable graphite rather than
ink.  And I notice increasingly large numbers of people, and not just
the flakes, use ever-changing or multiple mailboxes, because 'free'
webmail accounts are disposable resources.


So, here's the troubling question:  In an era when many people are no
longer needing to pay to keep their mailboxes active, and the mailboxes
of such people are effectively limiless, if they're quiet, how do you
know they're alive?  Some day, you may hear that the distant friend
whose GMail (or AOL Mail, GMX Mail, Hushmail, ICloud, Lycos, Mail.com, 
Mail.ru, Mailfence, Outlook.com, ProtonMail, Rediffmail, Tutanota, Yahoo
Mail, Yandex Mail, or Zoho) account you've been sending Christmas cards
to, died a decade ago.

Or, you might never hear at all.


If you want to provoke, or sneakily misappropriate, signs of life from a
correspondent, there are ways, because the Internet trolling industry
and the Internet datamining industries have pioneered the way.

o  Trolling:  Threaten your friend with something outrageous that will poke
   a response, or offer him/her money from a Nigerian prince, or
   equivalent.

o  Misappropriation:  Use 'web bug' techniques where your mail references
   one or more remote HTTP objects hosted on a Web server where you are 
   looking for hits in the logfiles.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_tracking


Looking at the matter from the other side, this is reminder of why it's
useful to let your friends know you're still breathing on a regular
basis.