mediajunk

Have you noticed that a lot of social sites now offer to find your contacts? It's definitely useful -- but do you trust Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter with your email address and password?! What about Fernando, SlugIt and Redface? (Okay, I made those ones up, but you get my point.)

How can I trust these new kids on the block? In short, I can't. But I trust Google. At least, they already have my login details!

So here's my suggestion: Google should offer a "protected contact list transfer service" whereby there's some sort of link or badge I can click in Twitter, Facebook, wherever. The link takes me to a page within Gooogle's domain where I login, and where the contact list transfer takes place. I can then go back to the host page. I envisage this process a bit like PayPal payment integration -- you temporarily leave a site to make a transaction within PayPal, then get redirected back to the site when the transaction is successful.

Better yet, Google should be able to guarantee me that the host site can only access the contact list for this fetch only. Maybe they could make the host site pay for this service? Maybe it could be an API?

Until Google offers such a service, I'm always going to be wary of giving a third party access to my email.

TechCrunch yesterday examined yet another Web 2.0 company called Seriosity that wants us to use a virtual currency for -- get this -- sending emails.

The idea is that the more currency (called Serio) "spent", the higher the assumed importance of the email, thus giving us a way to sift through our messages.

Techcrunch rightly poo-poohed the idea:

What isn't clear is what people can do with the currency other than send emails. Let me convert this into cash or frequent flyer miles or something else, and I'm in (beenz did this). Otherwise, what's the point, other than to amass a stunningly large number of Serio and then spend it on ... sending emails.

Nevertheless, the concept got me thinking. What if email weren't always free (aside from the ISP costs of course)? Would I be willing to pay a cent for each email I send, if it decreased the amount of spam I received?

Hmmm... maybe not just now, but if my inbox spam levels got out of control, then I'm sure I would go for it.

After all, I pay 10c -- I think -- to send an SMS message, and I send loads of those every day, never thinking about the cost.

I send more emails than text messages, about 10 times more ... hence my suggestion of 1c per email.

Is it inconceivable to pay for something that used to be free? Absolutely not. Think water.

I've been using Gmail as my primary email software for a couple of years now, for the following reasons:

• I find it has better spam filters than Outlook.
• Google pre-scans the messages for viruses.
• I can get my emails from any computer.
• I can use my Gmail account as storage and backup, by mailing documents to myself.
• I have not yet had to delete any old messages as the storage levels are so high, and continually increased.
• I can view PDF or Word attachments as HTML, so I don't have to wait for a separate application to load in order to read documents.
• I can make messages appear to be sent from any other email accounts for which I can verify ownership.

Some months ago, I got a Gmail for your Domain account, which I was excited about. Now, instead of just appearing to send emails from my Mediajunk account, I could do it for real.

Why should it matter? Well, sometimes my messages go into the recipients' spam folders, because the receiving programme realises that they have been sent from Gmail, not Mediajunk, as claimed. Other recipients see the message "sent by gmail on behalf of mike at mediajunk", which has confused some.

Anyway, I was all set to migrate to my hosted Gmail ... until I discovered that I couldn't merge my existing Gmail messages with my hosted version. For me, not having this ability renders the hosted account useless. It would mean effectively creating a new email account, and having to log in separately to my old Gmail address to find any old messages.

I have requested this feature many times and I see that others have too, looking at relevant boards. Apparently there's a workaround, but it's not a solid option.

I made one more probably futile attempt today, when I saw this Gmail suggestion box posted on Digg.

So come on Google, please integrate this really obvious feature!

Sidebar: it's probably no coincidence that Google has put a halt to development of new products (via Digital Inspiration), and has decided to concentrate on making existing products more interoperable.

This map says it all. Notice that Ireland is an offender (gasp!) while, contrary to popular belief, African nations hardly figure at all.

Commtouch has produced a revealing analysis of email spam that provides some informative statistics and many insights.

The top products pitched in spam messages in the first six months of 2004 included:

Drugs - 29.53%
Mortgage/Refinance - 9.68%
Organ Enlargement - 7.05%
Shopping - 6.86%
Software sales - 6.11%
Financial - 5.87%
Work from home/jobs - 4.06%
Dating - 3.15%
Porn - 3.1%
Weight Loss - 2.62%
Beauty products/Health - 2.53%
Debt solutions - 2.48%
University Degrees - 2.43%
Vehicle Warranties - 1.86%

Attempts to sell prescription drugs account for almost a third of all spam, then. This statistic may be better understood by another fascinating article -- an account of the current state of the pharmaceutical industry in the US -- that appears in the current edition of the New York Review of Books.

"The fact that Americans pay much more for prescription drugs than Europeans and Canadians is now widely known. An estimated one to two million Americans buy their medicines from Canadian drugstores over the Internet, despite the fact that in 1987, in response to heavy industry lobbying, a compliant Congress had made it illegal for anyone other than manufacturers to import prescription drugs from other countries"

Attempts to sell Viagra (sometimes along with other drugs) account for a staggering one in seven spam messages.

Most spam, according to the report, originates in the U.S. -- but is delivered from accounts hosted in China.

I was surprised to see that Nigeria didn't figure anywhere on the spam charts. Surely our Nigerian friends deserve some points, if only for effort and creativity? (If you agree with me, please send me your bank details IMMEDIATELY.)