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by John Topley.
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I've been having a problem with spam lately that is a direct consequence of
the technical decisions taken by two very different companies. One of them is an
ISP and the other is an online chat website.
The difficulties started a few months ago when I started
to receive e-mails from the enigmatically named Faceparty Mailbot telling me, or rather, someone
called Siany that there was a new message waiting for me from another Faceparty
member. I immediately knew what the problem was—I occasionally get other
people's e-mails because of the way my ISP (Freeserve) handles user names.
When you sign up with Freeserve you have to pick a
user name that becomes the part of your e-mail address after the @
symbol. So my user name is “topley.freeserve.co.uk”. E-mail
addressed to any address that ends with that user name will come to me.
Unfortunately Freeserve seem to allow other people to register using the same
name, which means that I get the odd incorrectly addressed message.
Some of it has been quite varied and entertaining. For example, I've had a farmer
enquiring about the history of some livestock, someone's camping holiday
photographs and even a naughty picture of someone's wife! Funny, that gentleman
didn't respond when I e-mailed him to point out that he'd reached the wrong
person…
It appeared that this was another case of mistaken identity and that this Siany person
had signed up to The Biggest Party on Earth ™ using the wrong e-mail
address. Not a problem, I thought, I'll simply contact Faceparty and get
them to contact Siany to tell her that she needs to change her contact
details. Faceparty have a contact form on their website which lets you select a relevant
department and then enter your message, which I duly did. After
receiving a standard, auto–responder:
“Hey, Thank you for writing to
Faceparty! This letter acts as confirmation that we have received your email. We
aim to respond to all queries within 5 working days, or 48 hours if you have
Cool Tools or your enquiry is billing related.”
—I received this message:
“Thank you for your email. Faceparty has
a strict no spam policy. We are governed by the EU Directive on Data Protection
and the Data Protection Act 1998.
We give you full control to choose if, when and
why you receive emails from us. You can choose exactly why we email you &
opt out of newsletters or message alerts by logging in to your account and
choosing 'Privacy Settings' from the 'My Settings' menu.
More information on this subject can be found in our website's Help section.
This letter is an automated response based upon
the department you chose and keywords in your letter. Because your letter could
be dealt with automatically, you will not receive a personal reply and your
original message has now been deleted. We hope this reply has been of help!”
—Well no, it hasn't been actually! I tried to contact them again, this time
choosing a different department and I got the same response. It would appear that
all of their e-mails are automatically generated based on keywords and that there is
no way to reach a real live human being at Faceparty
(hmm…maybe there aren't any?)
By now I was getting sick and tired of the daily flood
of e-mails for Siany, so I had no choice but to join the wretched Biggest Party
on Earth ™ myself and contact her directly. I signed up (using fake
details of course) and got in touch with Siany who kindly agreed to use her
own e-mail address as part of her contact details. I subsequently received
several bleeding heart e-mails from my old friend the Faceparty Mailbot telling me that I
hadn't created my profile or uploaded my photo, and that if I didn't within four
weeks then my account would be deleted, but I consigned them to the bit bucket. Because of poor technical decisions made by
both Freeserve and Faceparty, a simple invitation to chat had become just another part of the spam problem.
Update: a few days ago this message appeared in my Inbox:
“Hey Jade, It's great to hear that
you've joined us! Welcome to Faceparty - Your life is about to change.”
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