Sunday, September 21, 2008

Trying to upgrade email processing...

Again it has been a long time since I last posted to my blog. Too many things to do, blogger/blogspot had to go on a 'back burner' for a while.

Today I have started trying to process an email account on Yahoo that had hundreds of emails in the inbox dating back quite a while (due to using yahoo for email was on yet another 'back burner').

In the process I came up with a new strategy to attempt. I sorted the inbox by sender, and noticed the sender t the top of the list had only sent me one message. That led me to think hey, someone who waits for a reply before sneding another email might hypothetically not be a spammer. (Understand that the specific yahoo email account I was processing was one I tended to use in contexts in which I figured I might well be setting myself up to get spammed if I gave an email address, and sure enough if there is anything other than spam in that inbox, other than whatever I expected to arrive there today and thus went these to look for, it sure is hard to find amongst the hundreds of items that have many of the hallmarks of the kind of spam I figured I might have been letting myself in for.)

Thus I started to compose a first draught of a "form letter" to be used in future to reply to emails from people from whom I only seem to have received one email but that I cannot find in my files any indication of how exactly they came across my email address, what thread or conversation or whatever we had been engaged in that had led to them sending me that email, maybe even what computer I had been at when I requested that email or why, if I had subscribed to some kind of mailing list, that list had only managed to send me one email instead of whatever regular postings I had subscribed to that list in order to obtain.

Here is what I came up with:

--------------------------------------------------------------

Greetings! Unless Yahoo has deleted or spam-foldered any other emails you have sent me, the email to which I am replying seems to be the only email you have sent to this email account.

I am in the process of reviewing my email processing methodology and hopefully upgrading it in various ways, for example I do not seem to have any record of how exactly it is that we came in email contact initially nor why we settled upon this specific email account as our preferred method of keeping in touch with each other. Do you happen to have such records on file? As I cannot recall precisely when and where I told you to use this specific email address as send-to address when sending this specific category of information/email.

Since I see only the one email from you in my files, I am guessing the email to which I am replying is not a mailing-list message, because if I am on a mailing list I'd expect to see regular posts coming in from the list to which I subscribed. Thus I infer that that either I accidentally got unsubscribed or we were communicating by some means other than email, or by means of some other email account than this one, then for some reason I requested this specific item of information to be sent to this specific email address instead of to whatever address we had hitherto been using in our correspondence.

I am sorry it has taken so long to get back to you on this, unfortunately I got so swamped with spam that it has taken this long for me to come up with the strategy of looking for senders who only sent one message and who therefore are presumably waiting for my response to that message before continuing our conversation/correspondence.

Let us try to pick up the thread and get back to whatever it was exactly that we were trying to achieve.

-MarkM-

--------------------------------------------------------------