Sometimes I despair of how clueless politicians can be when it comes to technology. This morning we had a great pronouncement that the government will protect children by requiring sex offenders to give them their e-mail address. Quite apart from the fact that many of the companies are based outside UK jurisdiction, how difficult is it to get another e-mail address? Anybody can get one or more addresses from Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or countless others – which again are beyond UK jurisdiction. All it is is another announcement that technically just cannot work, or make any difference at all. Clueless, absolutely clueless.
Tag Archives: Mail
When Mailing Lists Go Wrong
I’m signed up on a good few mailing lists, last night it seems, one went wrong. Usually it is set up as an announcement list, sending out the messages that the company who runs the list wants to send out to it’s customers, however at some point it seems to have been switched over to a discussion list mode, whereby it sends any message from any member of the list to any other. As a result, after the message they sent out last night, this morning I had a stack of ‘out of office’ messages initially from some of the subscribers.
However, as with many of these problems, the situation is made significantly worse by some of the other mailing list subscribers. There were one or two ‘unsubscribe’ messages, but the real annoyance was the person who had bulk replied to all the ‘out of office’ messages asking them not to send them again – fine, aside from the fact that the messages all have a reply-to pointing to the list address and so he’d sent all the replies there instead and they had all bounced around to all the subscribers too! The original message header does say that that is what it would do, but then how many people actually look at the detail in that before hitting reply?
Fingers crossed, the owner of the list should now be in the office, and sorting out the problem, otherwise I suspect I’m going to have some more bouncing messages to deal with…
Late Post
Complaints about late deliveries of post from Royal Mail are nothing new, and our deliveries are usually fairly efficient – usually arriving at some point during the morning. However yesterday was by far the latest it has ever been delivered, almost 7 o’clock in the evening…