Good morning folks! I hope you are keeping warm and not suffering too much from travel problams.
This is one of those off-topic things that I'm posting because so many of you know things that I don't know ...
I'm increasingly seeing in emails (usually sent by organisations) a sentence like the following in the footer area of the message:
"To ensure these emails reach your inbox please add <sender> to your address book."
Ehhh?? If an email is delivered to me, it is delivered to my inbox. Punkt. So what's behind such a statement?
And are people to whom such a thing might apply supposed to have all possible senders listed in their adress books (otherwise they may not have emails delivered)????
I smell a certain kludgy software company in the background! Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@wlandres.net Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 02-Dec-10 Time: 09:00:23 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
"To ensure these emails reach your inbox please add <sender> to your address book."
Does it not date back to the days of early anti-spam efforts; i.e. mail clients would score email from people you send stuff to more favourably than emails from unknowns.
I've no idea if it is still valid advice, or if it's one of those IT meme's that lingers ("Please disable your AV software before installing this application" being another bugbear of mine).
Greg
On 02/12/10 09:00, Ted Harding wrote:
"To ensure these emails reach your inbox please add <sender> to your address book."
Ehhh?? If an email is delivered to me, it is delivered to my inbox. Punkt. So what's behind such a statement?
I would assume that they figure that if it's in your address book then it will bypass spam checks and not get dumped in your junk folder.
On 2 December 2010 09:15, Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk wrote:
On 02/12/10 09:00, Ted Harding wrote:
"To ensure these emails reach your inbox please add <sender> to your address book."
Ehhh?? If an email is delivered to me, it is delivered to my inbox. Punkt. So what's behind such a statement?
I would assume that they figure that if it's in your address book then it will bypass spam checks and not get dumped in your junk folder.
And then they go and change the "sending" address a few months later.
Tim.
(Ted Harding) wrote:
"To ensure these emails reach your inbox please add <sender> to your address book."
Ehhh?? If an email is delivered to me, it is delivered to my inbox. Punkt. So what's behind such a statement?
And are people to whom such a thing might apply supposed to have all possible senders listed in their adress books (otherwise they may not have emails delivered)????
Indeed, it's about whitelisting - email Spam filtering software like Postini (and probably most of the webmail services like GMail and whatever Hotmail is now known as) may flag an email from sender "x" as Spam (erroneously or otherwise) and junk it, however you can generally configure a whitelist of addresses which they will simply ignore (for filtering purposes) and pass straight through. Both this and blacklisting (for example binning email on receipt on the basis of RBL/Real-time black hole headers) are of course fraught with issues and, as you imply, you would ideally have to add every address you expect to deal with in order for it to be 100% foolproof.
Thus it's common for commercial entities to remind people who have such an email set-up to include their address in one's whitelist so that their "important messages" make it through.
Simon
On 02/12/10 09:30, sransome wrote:
(Ted Harding) wrote:
"To ensure these emails reach your inbox please add <sender> to your address book."
Ehhh?? If an email is delivered to me, it is delivered to my inbox. Punkt. So what's behind such a statement?
AFAIK, Outhouse, Outhouse ex-Cess, and Thunderbird all use this to not mark emails as spam. E.g. my Thunderbird (on Linux) has this option
Do not mark mail as junk if the sender is in: [X] Personal Address Book [ ] Collected Addresses
"marketing" emails from companies are widely distributed, and consequently just for this reason, some anti-spam systems will mark them as spam. Putting the sender of the marketing email in your address book really may prevent their email being marked as spam and ensures it gets through.
Personally I wish they wouldn't say "put is in your address book".
Regards Steve
On 03/12/10 11:13, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
"marketing" emails from companies are widely distributed, and consequently just for this reason, some anti-spam systems will mark them as spam. Putting the sender of the marketing email in your address book really may prevent their email being marked as spam and ensures it gets through.
The other reason they want to be added to the addressbook is, presumably, to make it more likely that remotely hosted graphics will be shown as intended, now that many (most?) email clients require the recipient to click a button to download remote graphics (again for anti-spam reasons).
-
Greg Thomas -
Mark Rogers -
sransome -
steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk -
ted.harding＠wlandres.net -
Tim Green