I don’t care for it. Perhaps you have it, and you love it, but I don’t like it.
Spam is a funny thing, and it’s hard to fix. But I realized back when I worked for an eCommerce company that we pretty much had to let all e-mail through, or we risked missing an e-mail from a customer or prospect. Saying that their e-mail got trapped in the spam folder wasn’t a good excuse (didn’t give customers the warm fuzzies).
Even though getting an e-mail to a SpamArrest client is pretty simple, I just have to get their confirmation e-mail and then click a link, I still find it a pain. Can you imagine if every e-mail you sent required extra steps? Bleh!
But here’s the point, and the only reason I’m writing about this here: what if that hiring manager doesn’t like SpamArrest? What if that important network contact doesn’t like SpamArrest? I think if I were deep in a job search again I’d probably discontinue my account until I landed the job.
I’m sure this is controversial, since no one likes spam and these guys have a decent tech solution. But remember the person on the other end of your e-mail that may be “too busy” to take that extra step. They are, in essence, your customer… don’t drive them away 😉
That is not the reason to hate SpamArrest, or indeed any other whitelist software.
The reason to hate it is what it does to spam — it sends unsolicited mail to the innocent third party named in the spam’s From: header, which is usually someone who’s actually managed to inconvenience the spammer in some way. Never mind thinking about losing an important contact — just think about what it’s like to receive a thousand emails from people demanding that you act as an unpaid quality control inspector for their spam-filtering software. (And don’t forget that you have to inspect each one individually just in case someone you actually wrote to is also using a whitelist.)
Using whitelist software is the electronic equivalent of discreetly sweeping doggy deposits onto your neighbour’s lawn. It’s not nice.
This is definitely not good for job seekers to use. Any extra work that you make employers do in order to contact you is the kiss of death. If they have any hoops to jump through, you might as well forget it.
While SpamArrest serves a purpose, I agree that it should not be used while searching for a job. Deal with the spam for a short time…it’ll be worth it in the end.
I hate SPAM, who doesn’t… Although SpamArrest is interesting, I agree that SpamArrest is itself spamming. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Also I wonder what happens to email from Yahoo groups or JibberJobber. How does a non-human mail service respond to such a request?! Not being a user of SpamArrest I don’t know but would hope that you can maintain our own white list for these conditions. However if you have white list control then why are you asking others to manage it for you! Also if everybody started using it then spammers would just write software to process and properly respond. In the long run there is no net gain in the war against SPAM.
Hmm, what happens the first time a sender that uses SpamArrest sends email to a recipient that is using SpamArrest. Hopefully that recursive scenario has been thought out!
Call me old fashioned but I like my mail server to separate SPAM candidates into a separate folder so I can quickly review them in bulk when I have time. I may have rescued less then 1% of Email that was targeted as SPAM. That isn’t a lot but if I was in transition I’d certainly want full control in my hands.
Gotta run since it looks like I just won a lottery in some foreign country 🙂
I agree with Heather. You want to make it easier for the hiring manager to contact you. No reason to give them an excuse to drop you and move on to other candidates that are easier to deal with.
Mike
Since many of your readers are IEEE members, they should be made aware that their IEEE e-mail alias gives them a spam filter solution Without the “spam arrest” inconvenience..
you can white list any domains to which you are applying, and set the settings for “low blocking, high notification” meaning that anything the system is 99.99% confident is spam is blocked, anything 90% likely spam or above will get an extra *** Suspected UCE *** in the subject line.. (these often also wind up in my yahoo spam folder.. )
– of course both yahoo and gmail also block a lot of spam with out the unfriendly alerts..
jbd
I always delete SpamArrest messages, and will not deal with people who use it. I am not a criminal. I do not appreciate being treated like one. Period. I don’t care who it is, I won’t do it.
I worked at Spam Arrest for several years, and while it can be very effective for the recipient, it needs a good bit of diligence to not be obtrusive to the sender. For example, it can auto-whitelist anyone you send email to, allow any mail send to specific addresses ( resume@mydomain.com ), provide disposable whitelisted addresses (usermame-keyword@spamarrest.com) as well as import address books, support mailing lists, whitelisting domains, etc, but most users don’t take the simple steps to do this.
Also, to Ians’s comment, they do try to avoid responding to forged emails, through a variety of detection techniques, but obviously some stuff still slips through the cracks.
And to Tom, yes, the recursive situations were figured out years ago 🙂
Spam Arrest is better than the spam filters that give you no way of proving you’re legitimate. I work at a help alias for a large company, and I could not respond to a customer’s repeated e-mails due to their spam filter. They also did not provide a phone number.
Another weird (funny?) SpamArrest experience today. I was out of the office for a few days and had Exchange send out notices of when I would be back in the office.
This morning I find somebody sent me email and then my auto out of office email triggered a SpamArrest message to me. So now I have to deal with 2 emails instead of one and since their original message was time sensitive and to my advantage they are probably wondering why I didn’t respond.
People that are using SpamArrest really need to do a better job of managing their white list. If they are sending email to some one they should add that address to their white list rather then being lazy and expecting the recipient to do the work for them!
Maybe I’m becoming a broken record but I’m starting to dislike SpamArrest a bit more…