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| A Note Regarding E-Mail, `Spam', and Anti-Spam Measures | |
Legitimate communication via Internet e-mail is being hampered severely by a flood of unsolicited email messages, known as `spam'. Even with the best-available spam filters, it is difficult to sort through the mountain of e-mail chaff in order to find the kernels of e-mail wheat, and it is inevitable that some valid messages are lost in the process. An article published in May 2006 reports that one hundred billion e-mail messages are sent each day, and that, of these, eighty billion are of the category `spam'. At the present time, an organization which publishes e-mail address on its web site typically receives on the order of a thousand or more spam e-mail messages a day at the very least.
When Internet e-mail came into being in the year 1982, all e-mail messages were in the form of `plain text' (also known as `ASCII'), such as could be produced by a typewriter. Not until recently did e-mail incorporate `formatted text' (also known as `HTML') which permits the use of various typefaces, colour, images, and sound. To this very day, some of the programs commonly used to send and receive e-mail are not able to handle formatted text. Consequently, legitimate messages sent as formatted text may not reach the recipient.
Almost without exception, a `spam' message is written in formatted text. Consequently, most spam can be eliminated simply by rejecting any message which contains formatted text; this measure has been adopted by this ministry. We urge all legitimate users of Internet e-mail to combat spam by adopting the simple, yet effective, measure of refusing to send and receive email which utilizes formatted text. Moreover, we endorse a return to the original concept of e-mail, namely, that e-mail is a means for instantaneous transmission of brief and informal messages in plain text. If it is necessary to transmit lengthy articles, illustrations, images, sound files, etc., these should be sent as e-mail attachments, rather than being incorporated into the body of e-mail messages.
Virtually all e-mail software can be configured by the user to send messages in plain text. Accordingly, when contacting this ministry via e-mail, we recommend that you send your message in `plain text' or `ASCII', to ensure that it is not automatically rejected as `spam' by our spam filter.
If you have sent an e-mail message to this ministry but have not received a reply, please try again. It is our intent to reply to every legitimate e-mail message which we receive.
Russell L. Harris, Evangelist <rlharris@gospelbroadcasting.org>
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| A Note Regarding E-Mail, `Spam', and Anti-Spam Measures | |