BigNick
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
At my place of work, they have e-cards to send corporate greetings. These used to be run by IT, but we in IT (I've since moved) got fed up with them and the communications people took over.
The cards are housed on an external site. You connect to the site, pick a design, type a message, and your sincere, heartfelt greetings are sent to the recipient. How nice. How eco-friendly.
(Aside: I think e-cards suck - it reminds me of an ad for subscriptions to a humorous magazine which said "Give a subscription! It's the gift that says, you're worth about $14.99", only in this case it's the card that says that you're worth 8 seconds of my time while I paste in your e-mail address.)
Back to the story: of course, the borderline narcissists who like to send these things don't stoop to doing it themselves. They get their secretaries (people under 40: ask your parents) to do it for them. So the secretaries are calling IT (ha, wrong department) at 3pm on Christmas Eve asking how they can get their boss's sincere seasonal greetings out to 200 recipients (answer: you can't, it's one e-mail address per card).
Now, the kicker: we use much the same spam filtering software as everyone else. On our system, by default, everything which gets more than 5.0 points is flagged as spam, and if our users follow our recommended configuration, that means it'll go straight to the spam folder and never be read. On this system, these e-cards all score about 9.5. So probably 90% of them are discarded by the recipient's e-mail system anyway. Merry Christmas indeed!
The cards are housed on an external site. You connect to the site, pick a design, type a message, and your sincere, heartfelt greetings are sent to the recipient. How nice. How eco-friendly.
(Aside: I think e-cards suck - it reminds me of an ad for subscriptions to a humorous magazine which said "Give a subscription! It's the gift that says, you're worth about $14.99", only in this case it's the card that says that you're worth 8 seconds of my time while I paste in your e-mail address.)
Back to the story: of course, the borderline narcissists who like to send these things don't stoop to doing it themselves. They get their secretaries (people under 40: ask your parents) to do it for them. So the secretaries are calling IT (ha, wrong department) at 3pm on Christmas Eve asking how they can get their boss's sincere seasonal greetings out to 200 recipients (answer: you can't, it's one e-mail address per card).
Now, the kicker: we use much the same spam filtering software as everyone else. On our system, by default, everything which gets more than 5.0 points is flagged as spam, and if our users follow our recommended configuration, that means it'll go straight to the spam folder and never be read. On this system, these e-cards all score about 9.5. So probably 90% of them are discarded by the recipient's e-mail system anyway. Merry Christmas indeed!