TriumphAnt

Inventors and scientists call it the “Eureka!” moment.
 
I think this example is more appropriately called a “Hallelujah!” or “Thank God! It’s about time!” moment, but whatever you want to call it, it looks like the mighty Rogers Communications has just experienced one.
 
For the past four months at least, I have been faithfully returning to Rogers, each and every night, one enormous attachment-laden message containing all the spam e-mails that have landed that day in my Rogers e-mailbox. I estimate – conservatively – that Rogers has received from me no fewer than (four and a half months, say 140 days or so, X a minimum of 85 messages per day = at least 11,900) messages. I have titled each night’s transmission “Unsolicited bulk e-mail for [Date]” and the message body has been the same few simple words: “Return to originating ISP – Rogers.com.”
 
Yes, it’s anal; yes, it’s inconvenient. But my earliest communications with Rogers on the subject had always led down precisely the same dead-end street. They sent me a canned “How to prevent unwanted e-mails” reply instead of opening a dialogue. The gist of their advice was that the arrival of spam in my e-mail was entirely my doing. “Never reply to a spammer,” they said. “Never leave your e-mail address where it can be harvested by a spammer,” they added helpfully.
 
Never was there even a whisper of an acknowledgement that their “firewalls” were non-existent or that they were hoping to review and improve their system. That tacit refusal to accept any responsibility at all for sending me all these unsolicited messages, some with incredibly vulgar subject lines and preview windows filled with images that used to be seen only by shuffling old men in badly-fitting raincoats – or any responsibility for considering anything that might reduce the blight of garbage emanating from their service – is what set me on the road to returning (to date) almost 12,000 spams to them.
 
So a few weeks ago, I noted a media announcement of Rogers’ forthcoming merger with Yahoo and thought, “Oh &%#$@!!! GREAT!”, because Yahoo has always been a source of a large percentage of the spam that pours into my Rogers address. But then I received a message from Rogers that announced, as a part of the merger process, they were going to initiate a new series of moves aimed at reducing spam.
 
Uh huh, I muttered darkly. Sure you will.
 
Well the day before Bastille Day 2004 (Mark your calendars!), Rogers might in fact have actually taken a worthwhile step up the scaling ladder from which to storm the walls of Fortress Spam. About halfway through the day, according to the time signature on the spam messages I received that day, the indication “[Bulk]” began to appear as the first word of each spam’s subject line. I actually sat and stared at it, dumfounded.
 
Simple. Elegant. Effective.
 
Shortly after dinner, I opened my “Message rules” option and created a simple new rule: each message with “[Bulk]” appearing in its subject line was to be consigned to my “Delete” folder. Then I waited. As the day ran its inexorable course to midnight, I checked once or twice and, sure enough, everything Rogers had marked as a “[Bulk]” message was being automatically transferred to my “Delete” folder.
 
That’s when I had my “Thank God! It’s about time!” Rogers moment. I was so delighted, I didn’t even send my usual late-evening “Return to sender” message – for the first time since March 1st, give or take an Ides.
 
Now at this point, logical thinkers are logically thinking, “Well you idiot, why didn’t you just buy a mail guard program and set up the spam / bulk dumping yourself?” In fact, I had thought of that. I even did quite a bit of online reading about some of the almost infinite variety of spam-blocking software out there, from the Cadillacs that would block even a whisper of “Spam” no louder than the proverbial mouse peeing on a cotton ball, to the ones that are essentially Freeware and require you to choose from among all sorts of active (“Block this sender”) vs passive (“Block everything except messages specifically addressed to me”) variations. 
 
But to me, that reflects the whole problem I have with spam. It puts all the onus on the end-user client – and none on the service provider – to solve the problem. At its most extreme, my accepting that solution would be to accept the blame for all the spam arriving in my e-mail. But what I have always maintained with Rogers is that they should be capable of intercepting the vast majority of crap like this before it even leaves their servers. Especially ones with obscenity-laced subject lines and front-page hardcore pornographic images.
 
So I’ll give this “[Bulk]” flagging a chance. Based on very early results, it looks promising. Some crap is getting through; but it’s a small fraction of the former total, and my system is industriously trashing everything that Rogers pre-identifies as “[Bulk]”.
 
My suspicion is that the spammers will quickly clue in and come up with ways to defeat it. But in the meantime, both Rogers and I can enjoy the holiday from my “Return to Sender” campaign.
 
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Finally, here are a couple of footnotes about a couple of footnotes from a book I’m reading by Simon Winchester, entitled “The Map That Changed the World”:
 
1.
 
“Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin, along with Josiah Wedgewood and James Watt, were all Lunaticks, members of Birmingham’s Lunar Society, which met monthly on the occasion of the full moon. Freethinking, radical ideas were welcomed by a group that was principally involved in applying scientific discovery to the newly flourishing world of industry.”
 
Priestly was one of discoverers of oxygen; Darwin was to sire the man who would sire Charles (Erasmus was himself a respected physician, a well known poet, philosopher, botanist, naturalist and a believer in the evolutionary development of species); Wedgewood not only designed pottery, he brought industrialization to its manufacture; and Watt, of course, invented the steam engine, which drove air and water pumps that permitted coal mines to be sunk to hitherto unthinkable depths below the surface.
 
For the record, at that time, “freethinking, radical ideas” included what Winchester calls “spiritual gymnastics” – challenging (and consequently being branded a heretic) the widely promulgated Church “research” by Irish Bishop James Ussher that the world had been created at precisely 9:00 am, October 3rd, 4004 BC, and that fossils were created at the same time by God as a demonstration that He could make anything, including objects that appeared to make the world look older than Ussher said it was.
 
Every age should all be possessed of such “lunaticks”.
 
2.
 
I have read articles speculating about how swiftly the end came for one entire epoch when dinosaurs ruled the planet. Some scholars and Disney filmmakers have postulated a cataclysmic event on the order of a very large meteor strike on Earth that effectively terminated all sun-dependent life at a stroke. But I had no idea just how blindingly swift the end must have been until I read the following in the same book. In a different footnote, Winchester describes a quirky little extra noted in the discovery in 1820 by Mary Anning, a highly regarded amateur woman paleontologist of the day, of Britain’s first large aquatic fossil, a plesiosaur.
 
“More charming still her discovery that, lodged above its pelvic bone, right where its colon would have passed, was a newly formed coprolite, a fossilized version of the item that, had it lived, the beast was just about to leave steaming in its wake.”
 
One can almost imagine the scene. Two teenaged plesiosaurs are swimming up and down the boulevards in front of the local underwater hangouts, cruising the coral malls for nubile young plesiosauresses, when one abruptly looks up at the sudden appearance of an impossibly bright flash in the sky -- above and outside their aquatic world. “Uh oh,” he says to his buddy, “That could be trouble.” His friend, also looking up, responds with paleontology’s – and the world’s – first-ever appearance of irony.
 
“No shit,” he blurts out.
 
Literally, as Ms Anning would find out countless millennia later.