Email is Still Useful ⁂ starbreaker.org

I recently came across a Mastodon post by Lesley Carhart where she shared a screenshot of a post by somebody named "Custard Smingleigh". It goes something like this:

I remember when email was useful. Now it's all:
Confirm your email address for Slorp
Thank you for creating a Slorp account
Slorp is now BONTO!
BONTO!'s terms and conditions have changed.
BONTO! misses you.
BONTO! is shutting down.

I get a lot of that, too, and rather more than I'd prefer. Not to mention scams, solicitations from consultants based in India to do for my website what I already do myself, and even an unsolicited resume from some programmer in Nigeria looking for work. And I love me some romance scams.

tangent on romance scams (lewd)

At least once a week I get emails from alleged women who allegedly want to meet for some no-strings-attached sex. Those are probably scams, too, based in the pictures that come with these emails. Women who look like that don't take an interest in guys who look like me.

I mean, I'm not terrible now, and I'd probably be a solid 8 for my age group if I dropped another 80lbs and got some decent clothes, but whoever's sending these emails plainly assumes I'm sufficiently lonely or horny to put aside reason and go haring off after a fantasy. However, the fantasy they're selling isn't one I'm interested in buying.

My fantasy is that my wife and I get to be sixteen again, knowing what we know today and retaining our current financial status, and be the high school sweethearts we should have been while enjoying the physical intimacy we had shared as twenty-something newlyweds up until she was treated for breast cancer. We're still physically affectionate, but it's not the same as it used to be.

It's not that I think she neglects me, either; she doesn't. But I worry that I'm neglecting her, even though she claims lack of interest/desire, and I miss the way she used to mistake me for God when I touched her just right.

The technology just isn't there yet, and even if it got there in my lifetime, my wife and I would have to sell ourselves into indentured servitude to pay for it. Either that, or we'd have to start making our own pornos: "rejuvenated seniors getting it on".

tangent on political donation spam (also lewd)

Don't even get me started on political donation spam. I donated to Bernie Sanders' campaigns in 2016 and 2020. Not much, just ten bucks or so each. I've given more to the EFF, the ACLU, public broadcasters like WITF and WRTI, and my local bail fund.

But donating to these charities or political campaigns gets you put on a "sucker list" that gets sold or shared. Once you're on that list, good luck getting off of it.

It's like being a man and experimenting with bisexuality (something I never felt safe doing). Once word gets out that you've sucked a cock — and it almost ways does — that's it for you. Even if it was just one because you were drunk or curious or that one particular guy just did it for you, but you know for sure that you prefer women, you're a cocksucker for life.

PS: I might have donated to Bernie Sanders' campaign and voted for him in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic Party primary elections, but I voted to Clinton and Biden in the general elections — despite both being corporate-friendly neoliberal stooges — because I knew before I was old enough to jerk off that a vote for the GOP is a vote for the KKK. Likewise, not voting at all might as well be a vote for the Republicans. My conscience plainly does not exist for my benefit or convenience.

However, I suspect that Custard Smingleigh is exaggerating a little. But maybe they aren't. Maybe email has become no better than postal mail for a lot of people in that all they get is unwelcome communications from businesses. If so, they have my sympathies.

However, I still find email useful both at work and in my personal life. At work, email lets me create evidence of requests made in calls, so that if something goes wrong I can throw my boss under the bus instead of getting stuck holding the bag myself. I also honestly believe that any meeting or conference call that involves a PowerPoint deck can and should be replaced with an email.

Incidentally, there's actually a website called Just Use Email that's all about making effective use of this fundamental internet technology. A good place to start on that site is with their email superpowers page.

Regarding the use of email in my personal life: I still find it useful, because I still get email from actual people. I got several this weekend, as a matter of fact. (And I'm remiss in replying to at least one person.)

However, there are things I do to make email useful for personal communications:

I mercilessly filter my incoming mail.
Anything from a business gets automatically marked as read and archived.
Anything that comes from no-reply@ gets automatically marked as read and archived.
I have a personal website.
I publish a contact address on my website.
I encourage people to email me.
I email other people.

This last is of particular importance. I might be autistic, and I might not particularly enjoy reaching out to other people, but I still understand that if you want any sort of social life at all you've got to do the work. You've got to take the risk that other people might not have time for you, or be interested in hearing from you, too. That's just life.

Likewise with email being what you make of it. If you're only using it to interact with businesses and corporations, you shouldn't be surprised that your correspondents are all robots. That's just life, too.