The new year is only a month old, and I am already yearning for the past. I do not wish to return to last year – Lord knows that was a tough one for virtually everyone. No, I wish to return to the days when email was dependable.
It's funny, actually. I am old enough to remember the days before email even existed. Yet I do not want to go back to those neanderthalic days. I just want to return to that heavenly mid-point – the time after email was created but before spammers had jammed the works so badly that security measures became necessary.
With all the walls, screens, quarantines, and “potential spam weeders” now employed across the Internet trail, the odds of a lonely email successfully navigating all of the security barricades and barriers to come to rest safely and peacefully in its intended recipient’s “in box” are now a fraction of what they used to be. Frankly, it annoys me.
Last week, I was involved in a document revision with an opposing lawyer in a different city, and we exchanged drafts and comments via email. I received five emails from my worthy opponent with what I thought to be no issue. Yet I couldn’t figure out why his latter emails made no sense, and did not include any of the changes requested in my third email to him, until his sixth email apologized, noting he had just realized that my last two emails had been “tagged” as potential spam and routed to his IT department for vetting.
He had just read them, four hours after I had sent them, and realized my comments had not been incorporated in the messages he had sent while unaware of my missives. Reading his email made me wonder, so I went through the seven step process necessary to uncover my spam folder nestled in a hidden file on a hidden drive on a network server not mapped to my local drive, and checked to ensure I’d received all of his emails.
Alas, I discovered I had not. He had actually sent me seven emails, not five, himself. I had received the first three and the last two, but the middle two communiqués – his fourth and fifth emails– had been snagged by my “quarantine” program and relegated to the secret seven spam filter– even though they were sent from the same ip address and even from the very same computer. The devious fact that his sixth and seventh emails then arrived unscathed had hidden the treachery of the email wizards.
I do not claim to be an email expert, a member of the Internet intelligentsia, or a Web wonder. I am just a lowly attorney, who claims communication as one of my more finely hewned skills. When my communication weaponry is secretly depleted, or defeated, I am wounded. Hence, my lust for yesteryear.
Sadly, I have no suggested cures for this all to common occurrence of email diversion, and am highlighting it here more to engender sympathy from those readers who face the same travail than to offer any solace.
If you have a suggestion, however, please let us know – either by sending an email to the paper in which you are reading this column, or direct to us at the Levison Group at comments@levisongroup.com. Of course, after you send us your suggestion, you might want to pick up the phone and give us a call, to make sure we received your message.
© 2012 under analysis llc. Charles Kramer is a principal of the St Louis based law firm, Riezman Berger, PC. Under analysis is a nationally syndicated column of the Levison Group.