Like every market on earth, Every Day Fiction responds to our authors by e-mail. They enter that e-mail address on our submission form, and without fail, despite numerous promises that we won’t spam you, some idiot enters his address at gmail with a +everydayfiction on the end (so it looks like idiotauthor+everydayfiction@gmail.com).
Gmail has the feature that anything after the + sign gets ignored, so our return e-mail addressed to idiotauthor+everydayfiction@gmail.com will actually go to idiotauthor@gmail.com. And if we start spamming him, he can just block any incoming e-mail with +everydayfiction in the destination address field, and BAM! he’s foiled us! How clever!
This is stupid on many levels.
- Why the heck would you submit to a market that you think is going to SPAM you??? There has to be a relationship of trust between author and publisher (after all, you turn over your precious creative content to them, how is you e-mail address worth more than that?).
- Any spam bot in the WORLD can just strip that + off the e-mail address before it sends out spam. IT’S ONE LINE OF CODE.
So all you’ve really done by adding that + is
- not protected yourself against SPAM, and
- demonstrated a stunning lack of rational thought.
My advice, avoid this whole debate. Only submit to markets that you trust.
4 Comments(+Add)
Maybe that’s just how the guy sorts his email? You know, hand out your email messages with the +blabla, and he knows how to place/prioritize it. This makes extra sense when you consider that he might not know exactly what email address you’re sending his acceptance/rejection from, but, if reply use the provided email address exactly, he will still know exactly who the sender is from the To address.
Maybe he does this so that red flags fly and alarms go off so that he can be sure to read your email as soon as possible.
Part of trust means that you sometimes have to risk trusting that the other party did something for a reason other than the stupidest possible reason.
Full disclosure: I’ve never done this. The only email messages that I sort or tag are messages that I’ve sent to myself, which are helpfully labelled “NOTE”. Anything beyond that would only confuse me.
It’s POSSIBLE that you’re correct, though I know of no e-mail program that does what you suggest, and the “plus” symbol feature I described is actually recommended by Google to deal with spam.
I’m a big believer in Occam’s Razor. To paraphrase, when it comes to people’s actions, “the stupidest explanation is usually the correct one.”
Every email program allows for sorting based on the To line, and I can’t think of any that won’t allow you to do a wildcard followed by string, so as to isolate the “+blabla” for sorting purposes. I’d be surprised if you found a program where this was completely impossible.
On the other hand, your explanation, especially coupled with Google’s own suggested usage, makes your explanation likelier. I don’t think you can call your reasoning method “Occam’s Razor”, though… I think you need to coin a new term for it.
Sweet! I heart coining new terms. What about Bush’s Razor? Is it still cool and topical to make fun of him?