Listbot

Some years ago I decided it was time to create an email newsletter. I had been doing quite a bit of research on internet promotion, and it was quite obvious that a newsletter is an essential part of any advertising campaign. I didn't know much about elists at time, so I more or less used first service that I found. That service was Listbot.

Listbot was cool. It was easy (almost trivial) to create a list (or as many lists as I wanted). In fact, I soon had finished creating my list and went on to attempt to get people to join (and that's hard part of job of any listmaster). Listbot seemed to be perfect service, and price of a small advertisement at end of each newsletter seemed very reasonable.

I kept my mailing list on Listbot for about a year until I more or less outgrew their service. Oh, it would handle my list easily (well under 500 subscribers), but I was finding user interface awkward and difficult to use. So I went off to find a different service, and after some searching and experimenting, settled on Bravenet's mailing list.

Moving list was a pain but fortunately it was fairly small so I managed to do it in a few hours. For next few months, I was happy on Bravenet's service, until I ran into 500 email address limit. At that time, Bravenet did not provide a solution for larger lists.

Thus, I had to move my list again, and this time I moved it to my own list server. Now I have none of limits forced upon my by other list services. With any luck, I will never have to move list again.

I never did delete my Listbot account, and thus received occasional mailings from them. A few weeks ago, I received an email which I found interesting. Here is first paragraph of that email.

"Dear ListBot User:We are sending this letter to inform you that effective Aug. 20, 2001, we are discontinuing central ListBot service. ListBot has become a very popular free service, and we've been pleased to offer this valuable tool to both consumers and business users. As a provider of services for small and medium-sized businesses, our main goal is continual improvement of services to meet growing needs of business users. To achieve this goal, we have launched new List Builder service, an enhanced e-mail marketing tool that will take place of ListBot."

Is there a foul smell in air?

What's problem with this? Well, I've been seeing this more and more lately and it really ticks me off. This is when an excellent service is picked up by a large company and ruined, destroyed or simply closed down. The company cannot make service fit their business model so they simply discard it without a single care that human beings are recipients of their services and products.

Almost as bad is when service is modified to fit larger company's standards and previously excellent tool or service is made more-or-less worthless. The best example of this behavior is destruction of Webring system by Yahoo! in September of 2000.

http://www.internet-tips.net/Advertising/Webrings_blacktuesday.htm

These companies have totally forgotten (or don't care) that people, real flesh-and-blood human beings with feelings, use and depend upon their services.

It took me all of a minute to determine that their email was totally and completely insecure. Fortunately for them, this was in days before it was common for company computer systems to be directly connected to internet, because their email messages were stored in plain text in a well known system location. In fact, not only were email messages stored in a completely insecure manner, but deleted messages were not actually deleted until an administrator purged them - and since they didn't have anyone doing that there was a complete record of company emails going back years in past.

I had spent about thirty minutes on this part of audit so far and was ready to move on when one of email messages caught my eye. It was a particularly juicy romantic message from one employee to another. Well, romantic is not right word - highly x-rated would be more like it.

Curious, I continued looking through emails (off clock, of course, since I had already accomplished my mission as regards email) to see what else was stored in single message file.

I stayed up all night long, highly amused at what I saw that day. Believe me, I read some serious blackmail material (if I was that kind of person). Lots of office romance, some flirting, X-rated messages and other similar things. I remember one particularly scandalous series of hundreds of emails going back and forth between one man and a woman (both single) recounting their relationship for years. Every date, every x-rated encounter was written up in long, detailed messages. This was very entertaining stuff indeed.

After a few hours I got bored and stopped reading. I was tempted to keep a copy of email data but resisted. That was not part of my mission. Fortunately, it was also not part of my job to report on indiscretions committed by various employees. My job was to find and fix any insecurities, and that's exactly what I did ... I erased file and set up an automatic purge to permanently delete old emails. At time that was best that I could do.

I learned a very important lesson that day - email is not private. Not by any means.

Not much has changed in intervening years. In fact, email messages are generally not encrypted in any way. In fact, I have never received an encrypted email and I've only sent a few in my entire life.

Just so you completely understand, a normal email message is NOT equivalent of a letter send through normal mail. In that case, you write your note on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope and drop it into mail. As far as email is concerned, a better analogy is of a postcard. Your messages are "written" on electronic equivalent of postcards. What does this mean to you? Anyone can look at your message. Quite literally, anyone.

Let's look at process to illustrate how and when an email message could be read by another person.

1) You write email using your email client. The client may create that email as a text file in a temporary folder on your hard drive. If someone looked at your hard drive they could find email. And it's not any better if you use a web based email client such as Hotmail. These leave files in Temporary Internet Folder, which can easily be recovered. Remember that next time you read your emails at work...