Stop at Zona-M

Email is one of the most useful and more widely used applications of the Internet. So far, however, I have met very few people that seem aware of how suboptimal its usage is, or of the problems that may arise when many people will start to realize it. Please note that, while the rest of this page explains these statements only in the case of email, most of it applies to any other form of direct, person-to-person communication through the Internet (chat, IM, VoIP phone calls, social networking through Facebook or Ning…).

Preface: this is the translation of a post written on April 2, 2010, to explain to all italian Internet users, with a real-life example, of the complete uselessness of copying or forwarding protest email about whatever argument to politicians or any organization.

Email is a crucial, basic service that is almost impossible to not use these days, but the way email is normally used these days has serious limits. The most common answer I get when I try to explaine those limits is some variation of “you may be right, but… I’m not I software programmer and never will, so I have no choice but to use what’s around”. This is wrong.

As I wrote in the Online Loser Guide, Internet is a wonderful thing, but should be used with lots of attention. Following the flow without thinking you just risk to contribute to lots of confusion, as shown in the example below (which is quite recent, even if for several reasons I was unable to publish it earlier).

Infostrada is one of the biggest Internet Access Providers (IAP) in Italy. Barracuda is a software filter that analyzes all the email messages entering the network of an organization in order to block spam, viruses and similar.