The ubiquitousness of no-brain-required social networks and mobile apps has made many people forget, or never learn, a boring truth of digital life: a LOTnon-ephemeral online communication still happens via less glamorous, but much more effective tools like email and mailing list. This can have unintended consequences.
Sometimes support comes in the most unexpected ways. Today the NSA, the super-secret spy agency that intercepts countless digital communications worldwide, greatly helped me, by providing evidence that a little project of mine is a really great idea that is sorely needed NOW.
Now the Snowden/NSA/PRISM affair has finally made evident, to an audience immensely larger than geek circles, that I (with many others of course) was right. Everybody, including non-geeks (no: starting from them) should have, as soon as possible, at least the possibility to
Even in this age of private and public organizations merrily handing out their email Gmail or some other “cloud” provider, there still are lots of organizations that run their own email server. This is better, in my opinion, for reasons I have already explained in “Wanted: Virtual Personal Email Servers”. Every now and then, however, the administrator of one of those servers goes online and asks something like “how can I automatically refuse or delete all email coming from certain countries?”
