Re: <nettime> email filter blues and the s word

[Geert Lovink via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

> On 6 Dec 2023, at 5:31 pm, José María Mateos via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:
> 
> Have you tried sending your original e-mail, but without any of the forwarded messages, and append those to a text file linked somewhere else?

Of course we could try. Here is the intro and then the messages below it can be read here: https://swertz.org/index.php/s/W2S7scPHEDtr7Lo. 

Dear Nettimers,

what kind of spam do you receive? As the whole list drama of the past period centred around ’spam control’ as the main argument of Google, Microsoft and a few others to kill independent email servers, I started to become curious, again, about the spam phenomena itself. Here at the Institute of Network Cultures we receive a decent amount. So much that we started to oversee crucial emails of interested parties and people in our work, seeking collaboration.

Lately I also discovered a new genre, perhaps related to the rise of AI: personalized machine-generated letters that are customized in such a way that you start to get confused: is this a person, genuinely interested in our work, or a machine? Usually, they oversee one or two details and then you know… We have an .org domain and are very obviously not a company but very visibly part of a Dutch (large) non-profit public education institution ~(hva.nl <http://hva.nl/>). If this is not taken into account you know they did not even look for a second on our website: it’s spam. However, they politely come back to you, addressing you in an informal way, a few days later, insisting they want make a personal appointment, pretending there is a already some kind of personal contact or connection. Intimidating and uncanny. Same happens with invoices.  But then… there are still the classic ones from China, which, in contrast, are a relief to read. 

Best, Geert






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