This is not directed at any one person … but specifically at the entire groups of people who, come festival season, literally spam their friends on Orkut/LinkedIn/FaceBook/Hi5/[put-your-fav-social-network-here] with messages of “Happy Diwali”, “Id Muburak”, “Happy new year”, etc, etc.
I got about 50-75 messages with “Happy Diwali” over the last week on my Orkut scrapbook. I call it festive-spam.
This is not cool!
I mean, I know their intentions are honourable, etc. But my take on bulk-messaging is simple … don’t send it!
Send a greeting/message only if you would have done the same through postal mail (archies/hallmark card) or a phone call (SMS’s are included in my category of festive-spam).
On my birthday, I used to get phonecalls or birthday cards … this tradition continues into cyberspace. Each birthday card, ecard, email, SMS, Orkut scrap I received … I made sure I replied to; personally and independently (no “Thank you for the wishes everyone” styled replies from me).
But of the dozens of diwali wishes I got, I haven’t replied to any one of them. It is spam .. it took the author a few seconds to type and send, but the rest of us have to deal with reading it, hitting the reply button, typing something (even if it’s just copy/pasting a bulk reply).
29 Oct 2006 at 2:05 am
Kinda unrelated but here’s my take…
A long time ago in the days of Wordstar 4, I was thought the concept of mail merge. More than a decade later, no one seems to know how to use it in conjunction with email. I do not feel obliged to ever respond to something that is not directly addressed to me or sent by someone who does not know how to use mail merge. (Just came from here, so stop googling and try to see if you can figure how to get mail merge and email to work together. You are the M$ products guy; you should be able to figure this one)
29 Oct 2006 at 2:07 am
Gaah “thought the concept!!!” what was I thinking
4 Nov 2006 at 11:51 am
I can understand how annoying it can be. The best way, I can think of (u already know), to handle it is:
whenever you are expecting some such occasion (diwali/new year, b’day) create some filter and redirect to some folder (follow it for a year, and u can relax for many years to come).
At the end of the occasion, just select-all and clean the folder. Also, to avoid dumping emails from your dear ones, create filters for emails from your dear ones. (categorizing ur contacts can also be helpful, e.g closer/closer/closest/casual/family/business…)
In case you want to be double sure, you may want to have a cursory look before deleting-all.
Creating filters and all is one time job, to save u from many such annoying times to come. It wont take much time to figure out who all people are important in your life. (some theory says, it cannot be more than 150-200 :-) )
You cannot control intentions/actions of several thousands of such cyber social friends. All you can do is, get annoyed or take some preventive action. And unsubscribe such alerts, if these contacts/emails are not doing you any good. Once in a while, you can always go back to such sites and do your catching-up-with-old-school, whenever u r in such mood.
In the end, you can control only yourself, your actions & your reactions to stimuli from the environment. If something discomforts you, take some action, or spend some time staying at discomfort. Anytime its your call only.
talk of unsolicited advice. i couldnt help it, as i said, your call how you react, i just did what i liked :).