Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everybody,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette
Speaker 1: and I'm an editor here at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: With me, as always, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. I
Speaker 1: had Mexican for lunch. Okay, I think we should send
Speaker 1: emails about that to everybody in the world. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: before we before we get into the whole sending emails
Speaker 1: to everybody, let's talk about why we're about to talk
Speaker 1: about sending emails to everybody. Because you see this. This
Speaker 1: discussion was prompted by yes listener me. This was from Jason.
Speaker 1: Jason says, Hi, Tech Stuff, I love your podcast. I
Speaker 1: was wondering what is the most spam free online email site? Jason.
Speaker 1: We decided we were gonna kind of expand that into
Speaker 1: a discussion about spam in general. I hope you don't mind,
Speaker 1: but we will address your question. Um, if you absolutely
Speaker 1: have to know right now and you can't wait to
Speaker 1: the end, it's Gmail. So let's move on and talk
Speaker 1: about spam. Okay, so spam, of course, is unwanted junk
Speaker 1: email that you know, everyone knows. They they get every
Speaker 1: now and then. Sometimes if if you're using an email
Speaker 1: client that does not have a very good spam filter,
Speaker 1: you may get quite a lot of it. Uh, if
Speaker 1: you do have a very good spam filter, you may
Speaker 1: not even notice that you get it. You want to
Speaker 1: talk about the origin of the name, Um, well we could.
Speaker 1: Let's see. Uh, we've got spam, spam and baked beans, sausage, eggs,
Speaker 1: spam and baked beans, baked beans, eggs, sausage, spam, spam,
Speaker 1: spam and spam. Um, yeah, it's Monty Python. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a for those who do not know, there is a
Speaker 1: Monty Pie Thawn Skit and Monny Python of course. The
Speaker 1: famous British comedy troupe Um where a couple are in
Speaker 1: a diner and everything in the diner comes with some
Speaker 1: form of spam and it eventually falls into a chaotic,
Speaker 1: rumbling mess of just people singing the words spam over
Speaker 1: and over and over again. It makes no sense. It's
Speaker 1: just a big jumble, And that's sort of the genesis
Speaker 1: for the term as it applies to junk email. YEP,
Speaker 1: because you get, you know, a bunch of annoying messages
Speaker 1: that come over and over and over and fill up
Speaker 1: your inbox and you might you might have one gym
Speaker 1: and then tons of spam. So that's essentially where the
Speaker 1: name came from. And uh, I think Hormel is actually
Speaker 1: okay with it now. They weren't for a while there.
Speaker 1: They seem to be resigned to it. And hey, it
Speaker 1: is free marketing, right, it's it's one of those things
Speaker 1: where you know, once the name stuck, that was it.
Speaker 1: There was no going back. Um. But anyway, so spam,
Speaker 1: how much of email out there is spam? Yeah? Effect
Speaker 1: In fact, the vast majority of email is spam. That's
Speaker 1: not hyperbole, it's not kidding. It's absolutely true that the
Speaker 1: majority of email going across the Internet is junk. In fact,
Speaker 1: according to Suffuss, I assume that's how you pronounced the name.
Speaker 1: The research firm um they found that two point three
Speaker 1: percent of all email during the first cent during the
Speaker 1: first quarter of two thousand eight was spam. Uh. Over
Speaker 1: at Yale University, they they looked at the email that
Speaker 1: was going across their mail servers um in August two
Speaker 1: thousand eight, nine point five of all email was spam,
Speaker 1: So less than six percent of the email going across
Speaker 1: Yale's servers in August two was an actual legitimate email.
Speaker 1: That's just it blows my mind. I mean, you think
Speaker 1: these are messages that number in the billions really of
Speaker 1: of just junk email coming from lord knows where, a
Speaker 1: lot of it from Florida actually um uh from individuals
Speaker 1: who have created various uh email accounts to send out
Speaker 1: tons and tons of unwanted messages. And you might ask yourself, well,
Speaker 1: why why is there so much spam? Well, it's because
Speaker 1: do you know, even if you only get a one
Speaker 1: or two percent return rate on people clicking the spam links,
Speaker 1: that's still a huge number. Unfortunately, it's a very very
Speaker 1: cost effective way to market UM because people can buy
Speaker 1: discs with thousands and thousands and thousands of email addresses
Speaker 1: on them and it's you know, giant lists mailing list
Speaker 1: and you may have even signed up to be on
Speaker 1: one of those CDs. It is possible that by opting
Speaker 1: in to select mail from other of of related partners.
Speaker 1: You know, when you sign up for a legitimate email
Speaker 1: mailing list UM, that your name could have been sold
Speaker 1: to be on one of those CDs and you can look.
Speaker 1: Um Marshall brain our sites founder wrote an article about
Speaker 1: spam that's on how Stuff Works dot com and um,
Speaker 1: you know he talks about the fact that there are
Speaker 1: you can just you can go on to uh to
Speaker 1: Google right now and find these discs and buy them
Speaker 1: up there cheap and get tons and tons of email
Speaker 1: addresses to market people too. And you might have actually
Speaker 1: signed up for it yourself, right. I mean, you're just
Speaker 1: really annoying. If you think about this, you you know,
Speaker 1: your your expenses really are pretty minimal. I mean they're
Speaker 1: essentially your power bill, um an internet account, Internet account,
Speaker 1: And if you are a truly nefarious spammer, you may
Speaker 1: be creating a botanet army, you know, getting people to
Speaker 1: click on a link which installs a zombie trojan onto
Speaker 1: their computer, which gives you access to their computer. You
Speaker 1: can use their computer to send out spam. You don't
Speaker 1: even have to worry about broadband charges then, because you're
Speaker 1: you send a command to that person's computer. There's there's
Speaker 1: the computer that actually sends out all the emails, so
Speaker 1: you don't have to worry about running up broadband charges
Speaker 1: because you're just sending a simple command to all the
Speaker 1: computers in your button neet, as opposed to sending up
Speaker 1: millions and millions and millions of emails and um. Like
Speaker 1: we said, you know, if if only one or two
Speaker 1: percent of the people who get these emails click on something,
Speaker 1: that's gonna be a big enough return to justify the
Speaker 1: expense of setting up the spam operation in the first place,
Speaker 1: which is why it's so freaking evil. Yeah. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: unfortunate thing is it's also very hard to get rid of,
Speaker 1: um because you know they're there are things called white
Speaker 1: lists and blacklists. You may actually have exposed yourself to
Speaker 1: them if you've gone to the trouble of trying to
Speaker 1: set up an anti spam filter. Um, and there are
Speaker 1: tons of different ways to do that, but a white
Speaker 1: lister blacklist. Um. If somebody send you email, like say
Speaker 1: you've opted in for a particular company because they send
Speaker 1: you coupons or something, you say, I absolutely want the
Speaker 1: coupons from this company because I like them and I
Speaker 1: want to buy their stuff. Well they might say, hey,
Speaker 1: make sure to add this email address to your address book.
Speaker 1: Well that's called white listing. Basically, you're saying I absolutely
Speaker 1: think this is not spam, this is something I want
Speaker 1: to come into my inbox. Blacklisting, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: is putting a list on there and said I absolutely
Speaker 1: do not want this to come to my inbox. And
Speaker 1: the thing is if you get if you have something
Speaker 1: from say, you know, Yahoo's email account, and one person,
Speaker 1: you have a friend who has a Yahoo Mail account,
Speaker 1: they're sending you stuff. But a spammer uses a Yahoo
Speaker 1: Mail account, you can't very well go, well, don't ever
Speaker 1: send me stuff from Yahoo dot com because well, that
Speaker 1: would mean you'd be blocking your friend exactly. So that's
Speaker 1: when it starts to get a little trickier because then
Speaker 1: you can't just say, oh, well, I don't want, you know,
Speaker 1: q R seven M one dot com to ever send
Speaker 1: me email addresses, because spammers sometimes do that. They'll send
Speaker 1: they'll sign up for a domain name that nobody really wants,
Speaker 1: just as a front, and that makes them easy to
Speaker 1: block because you can say, I don't want anything from
Speaker 1: these guys. So if they even if they created another
Speaker 1: count using that domain name, you still wouldn't get that email.
Speaker 1: But as Plett points out, if they go with a
Speaker 1: free email service service like hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail something
Speaker 1: like that. Um, it's a lot harder to block it
Speaker 1: without blocking you know, people that you legitimately want to
Speaker 1: hear from. And not only that, but spammers are really
Speaker 1: clever about how to create these fake accounts to uh.
Speaker 1: We we've talked a little bit in the past. I
Speaker 1: wrote an article about capture and captures. Uh, it's a
Speaker 1: it's a test. It's supposed to be a test that
Speaker 1: humans find easy to complete, but machines find it very
Speaker 1: difficult to complete. Spammers are really good at finding ways
Speaker 1: around capture tests, which most free email services require you
Speaker 1: complete one of these in order to create an account.
Speaker 1: So that way it tries to prevent spammers from creating
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands of faults essentially fake accounts. So, um,
Speaker 1: there are different ways of doing this. You can either
Speaker 1: design soft where that can recognize the caption. Capture are
Speaker 1: those things where you know, you usually you see a
Speaker 1: box with some letters in it, and they're the letters
Speaker 1: are distorted, their wavy, there's maybe some some noise on
Speaker 1: top of them, like it looks like static, right, might
Speaker 1: even require you to do something like a simple math
Speaker 1: problem or you know, yeah, there's there that's that's one
Speaker 1: of the ways of trying to outsmart the machines, because
Speaker 1: what spammers are doing is they're either creating UM applications
Speaker 1: that can recognize the same sort of visual cues that
Speaker 1: we recognize when we look at captures, or they simply
Speaker 1: hire people to physically type in the answer. And what
Speaker 1: they do is they hire people overseas um in very
Speaker 1: impoverished nations and pay them an incredibly small amount by
Speaker 1: the hour to just go in and just solve captures
Speaker 1: all day long. That's all those they're they're doing. Um,
Speaker 1: I mean it, and it works. It's again it's it's
Speaker 1: cost effective. But as again, if you just get that
Speaker 1: small percentage of responses, it makes it all worth it.
Speaker 1: So that's a problem that these free email services are
Speaker 1: going to continue to struggle with for probably the foreseeable future.
Speaker 1: Until they can find a way to to really cut
Speaker 1: back on spammers creating thousands and thousands of accounts, it's
Speaker 1: just gonna keep happening. So that kind of brings us
Speaker 1: to what do you do you know, which which email
Speaker 1: service should you use to try and cut back on spam,
Speaker 1: and what kind of things can you do as a
Speaker 1: user to prevent yourself from getting on these spam lists.
Speaker 1: Um well, I guess we should take the second one
Speaker 1: first because it's it's generic across all email, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: so simple rules. I want to point out that the
Speaker 1: bad news If you have an email address, there's a
Speaker 1: very good chance you're going to get spam, right yeah.
Speaker 1: And the question is how much and how often? Um?
Speaker 1: Because the thing is, once you've created an email address,
Speaker 1: it depends on who you can eat it with. I mean,
Speaker 1: depending on your internet service provider, they might actually sell
Speaker 1: your email address. Um, so it is very possible. But
Speaker 1: say you signed up for you know, an email address
Speaker 1: with Google or Yaho, are somebody you know reputable if
Speaker 1: you don't ever send that email address to anybody. And
Speaker 1: I could say this from personal experience because I have
Speaker 1: a couple that I was going to use and just
Speaker 1: never haven't went. You know what, I'm gonna go check
Speaker 1: the spam box. They're empty, They're free of spam. If
Speaker 1: you don't ever share it with anybody, and you sign
Speaker 1: up with a reputable provider, you don't have to worry
Speaker 1: about it. As soon as you start telling people that
Speaker 1: you have an email address and what it is. Yes,
Speaker 1: so you're opening yourself up because you never know what
Speaker 1: they're going to do with it. If you want an
Speaker 1: email address but you don't actually want email, wait, why
Speaker 1: would you do that? So if you're not Pullet, if
Speaker 1: you're not Pullet, and you actually want to have contact
Speaker 1: to the outside world, UM stop it. But let's say
Speaker 1: that you want an email address for you know the
Speaker 1: same reason, which is to exchange letters with people to
Speaker 1: whom you are connected. Otherwise, Um, well, then certain rules
Speaker 1: that you should follow. Don't put your email address in
Speaker 1: a in a publicly viewable place on the Internet. So
Speaker 1: if you have a message board, a message board, a
Speaker 1: blog account, Facebook, I mean, these are just very simple,
Speaker 1: uh rules, you know, if you put your address up there.
Speaker 1: There are plenty of programs out there that all they
Speaker 1: do is crawl the Internet searching for the format of
Speaker 1: an email address. So they're looking for a name, they're
Speaker 1: looking for the AT symbol, they're looking for the domain,
Speaker 1: and then it adds it to the list. They're called spiders.
Speaker 1: And if you've every sort of thing that works for
Speaker 1: search engines, as a matter of facted it does basically
Speaker 1: the exact same thing is it's going onto a web
Speaker 1: page looking for information. Um that's why if you've gone
Speaker 1: to a web page and you've been confused because it says,
Speaker 1: you know, you know Chris and then it has parentheses
Speaker 1: at the words spelled out and then you know whatever
Speaker 1: dot com you're going way man, And why did they
Speaker 1: spell that out? And I didn't just put the AD symbol.
Speaker 1: That's why, because the spider is looking for the AD symbol.
Speaker 1: Exactly is it is trying to pick up any uh
Speaker 1: any email address it confined, and it will do it
Speaker 1: on other forums to um use net. You know, they're
Speaker 1: all kinds of crawlers out there looking for these email addresses.
Speaker 1: So if you don't post it where it's visible, you know,
Speaker 1: that will help. Same thing if you're if you're you know,
Speaker 1: if you're filling out a lot of online forums for
Speaker 1: various services, that's another good way of having your email
Speaker 1: address passed around. Look at the terms of service for
Speaker 1: any service that you're going to sign up for. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: it is annoying. But if you if you're really concerned
Speaker 1: about spam, Like, if you're not concerned about spam, go ahead,
Speaker 1: but if you're concerned about spam, you you probably want
Speaker 1: to take a look at that see if they, you know,
Speaker 1: what their policy is on sharing your email address with
Speaker 1: other parties, because sometimes they make partnerships with other companies
Speaker 1: and they get money for the email addresses they provide
Speaker 1: to these other companies. Um. And just as an note,
Speaker 1: you know, you may sign up with a company that says, oh,
Speaker 1: we will never ever sell your name to people, and
Speaker 1: it will be in their terms of service, and then
Speaker 1: there will be a clause at the end of the
Speaker 1: terms of services say we reserve the right to change
Speaker 1: our terms of service. So just keep it in mind.
Speaker 1: Even the most reputable companies you know, there, they may
Speaker 1: decide that they don't want to abide by that policy
Speaker 1: anymore and change and hopefully they won't, but you know,
Speaker 1: you can't control that. Yeah. So if you like doing
Speaker 1: things like let's say, online sweepstakes, okay, there there are
Speaker 1: sites out there that just aggregate online sweepstakes and you
Speaker 1: can go and just you know, either sign up for
Speaker 1: a service so that they automatically fill out your information
Speaker 1: on pretty much any sweep stakes you want, or you
Speaker 1: can physically go in and fill out that information yourself.
Speaker 1: Sweep stakes. That's one of those things where people like
Speaker 1: companies do tend to to share the information around and
Speaker 1: and put you on lists. So, um, if you like
Speaker 1: doing that sort of thing, what I recommend you do
Speaker 1: is create an email address specifically for that purpose that's
Speaker 1: not your personal email address, so you don't really care
Speaker 1: if you get tons of spam um. And then you
Speaker 1: use that one for anything, anything where you're gonna have
Speaker 1: to fill out a form or you're gonna you know,
Speaker 1: send information into a sweep steaks or whatever, um, And
Speaker 1: then you don't have to worry about that coming up
Speaker 1: your your personal information when you're looking, you know, for
Speaker 1: your email from you know, your buddy Bob. Um. You
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about filtering through eight D viagra
Speaker 1: emails first, you know. Uh. I could say from personal
Speaker 1: experience that that does work. However, it's still annoying because
Speaker 1: then you go into your sweep Snakes box and go, crud,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of spam in here. Yeah. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's why I signed up. So at the beginning, I
Speaker 1: mentioned Gmail being one of the best free email services
Speaker 1: when it comes to blocking spam, and uh, and I
Speaker 1: really do think that's true. Um. I've seen claims saying
Speaker 1: that as much as spam is blocked before it gets
Speaker 1: to you, and that many people have stopped checking their
Speaker 1: spam folder because that's usually if Gmail identify something as spam,
Speaker 1: it will put it in your spam folder. Um, because
Speaker 1: people were going to their spam folder just to make
Speaker 1: sure that nothing legitimate had accidentally fallen in there. And
Speaker 1: if you read the reports, everyone says, I've never found
Speaker 1: a real email stuck in the spam folder? Have you
Speaker 1: in Gmail? We'll see this is the things that I
Speaker 1: haven't either. But again I didn't suspect. I suspected that
Speaker 1: that was not across the board. Um, well, g Google
Speaker 1: is having to do the same thing that everyone else is,
Speaker 1: and they're relying on algorithms that tell them what is
Speaker 1: and what isn't spam. But you know, the spammers are
Speaker 1: so clever. Of course, I'd rather err on the side
Speaker 1: of caution. No. Wait, now, have you seen spam mail
Speaker 1: in your inbox or have you seen something that should
Speaker 1: have been your inbox in the spam folder or both both? Okay,
Speaker 1: it doesn't happen very often either way. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: actually part of what helps them fight spam and one
Speaker 1: of the things that Gmail does and several other free
Speaker 1: email services does do does do a similar thing. Ah Man,
Speaker 1: next good food, I tell you. So they do a
Speaker 1: similar thing, which is where they allow users to identify
Speaker 1: messages as spam. And once you do that, uh Gmail.
Speaker 1: In the case of Gmail, they flag it and then
Speaker 1: essentially they prevent that message from going into anyone's inbox.
Speaker 1: They look for the identical messages that are going to
Speaker 1: other Gmail users and block it. So the nice thing
Speaker 1: about that is as soon as someone flags it, it
Speaker 1: affects the system pretty much. I mean it's we're kind
Speaker 1: of oversimplifying here, but it means that it reacts very
Speaker 1: very quickly because as soon as someone and it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter who it is, but anyone who's using Gmail does that,
Speaker 1: the whole group gets to benefit. Yeah, and there there
Speaker 1: are other solutions to UM. On the corporate side. You
Speaker 1: can see UM spam prevention UH actual hardware that you
Speaker 1: can plug into your network that will do some of
Speaker 1: the filtering. And of course there's enterprise software and consumer
Speaker 1: software that you can use. UM. You know, I have
Speaker 1: an I s P that actually relies on a technology
Speaker 1: that Semantech picked up a few years ago UM called
Speaker 1: bright Mail, and bright Mail works very well. But UM,
Speaker 1: you know, the thing is, the spammers are clever enough,
Speaker 1: and the software is only so good so that you know,
Speaker 1: you check in the suspect mail folder and there's always
Speaker 1: something that's that slips through. I think a lot of
Speaker 1: these solutions are really good. It's just, um, the spammers
Speaker 1: are just clever enough where they can work their way
Speaker 1: around it. They usually do with a trick of social
Speaker 1: engineering or yeah, you know, I can definitely say that. Um,
Speaker 1: between my Gmail account and my Hotmail account, I get
Speaker 1: far fewer spam messages in my inbox and Gmail than
Speaker 1: I do in Hotmail. And both of them have spam
Speaker 1: folders and both of them have filters, but Gmail seems
Speaker 1: to be the more effective one for me, right right? Well? Um, Oh,
Speaker 1: one one thing I thought was really cool about the
Speaker 1: Gmail solution that I didn't know before, Um, is there
Speaker 1: actually if you're familiar with the controversial Google book search, um,
Speaker 1: which is Google's attempt to digitize a lot of paper everything.
Speaker 1: There's their mission is to organize the world's information that
Speaker 1: includes everything that's already been printed. Yes, um, and there
Speaker 1: are some copyright issues that government looking into, but we'll
Speaker 1: gloss over that. But one thing that that I didn't
Speaker 1: even realize and I wouldn't have even thought possible, actually,
Speaker 1: is they're using the optical character recognition that they used
Speaker 1: for Google book Search and putting it UH in there
Speaker 1: to help identify image spam. Yeah. Actually, image spam was
Speaker 1: on the rise for a very long time because UH
Speaker 1: spam filters had a lot harder time identifying messages that
Speaker 1: used images as opposed to text and saying oh, well,
Speaker 1: that's obviously spam. So you would get a message and
Speaker 1: you'd open it up and there'd be a blue pill
Speaker 1: or you know whatever, and uh, and again it was
Speaker 1: just a spam message trying to get you to click
Speaker 1: on some sort of ad deal or possibly even malware,
Speaker 1: because that a lot of viruses do travel through email, um,
Speaker 1: and a lot of these were coming through and getting
Speaker 1: into people's inboxes and and Gmail. The Gmail solution is
Speaker 1: to compare it back against this database that they've created,
Speaker 1: and if it matches, then um they block it. No,
Speaker 1: those images can also be tracked, and if you open
Speaker 1: an email and your email loads that image and they say, oh,
Speaker 1: well look at that, Bob opened his email, that's a
Speaker 1: confirmed email. Actually, that's another really good point pilette. If
Speaker 1: you've ever received a message where one of you didn't
Speaker 1: want to get any email from that address anymore, and
Speaker 1: you see down there at below it says, you know,
Speaker 1: if you no longer want, wished to receive these emails,
Speaker 1: click here to take yourself off this list, especially spam.
Speaker 1: Don't do that, especially with spam, because what that does
Speaker 1: is it tells the spammer that that is a legitimate
Speaker 1: email address, and rather than necessarily taking you off that list,
Speaker 1: which the spammer may even do. The spammer might take
Speaker 1: you off that list, but the spammer will immediately add
Speaker 1: you to every other list you can imagine. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that whole can spam legislation thing not so effective. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So yeah, do not fall for the Oh, let me
Speaker 1: just click this link and then I'll never have to
Speaker 1: worry about this email ever again, because you'll have to
Speaker 1: worry about lots and lots of other emails. Um. Something
Speaker 1: else that I thought about just now, Um dictionary attacks. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, sometimes spammers don't even go online to find
Speaker 1: your email address. If you're Bob at domain dot com,
Speaker 1: you and Alan at domain dot com and Susan at
Speaker 1: domain dot com and anything else it's an actual word,
Speaker 1: might end up with spam because especially if it's someplace
Speaker 1: like an I s P because there they figure that
Speaker 1: everybody is going to have, you know, and an email
Speaker 1: dress and then you have the Bob one at domain
Speaker 1: dot com and Bob too. You know, they're just kinda
Speaker 1: keep adding those addresses in the hopes that they hit
Speaker 1: pay dirt, and in most cases they're going to you know,
Speaker 1: attain point. It will trail off. But but you know,
Speaker 1: if you use an easily picked name, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's an easy target for spammers. Yeah, yeah, they'll they'll
Speaker 1: just they'll just do a carpet bombing and they'll send
Speaker 1: out millions of messages, and those millions of messages maybe
Speaker 1: a million actually hit targets. And then now those million,
Speaker 1: maybe a hundred thousand click on it. But that's still
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand positive hits. So again, I mean, think
Speaker 1: of it like as opposed to think of the work
Speaker 1: you would have to do to identify the hundred thousand
Speaker 1: people who would actually respond and then send them messages
Speaker 1: and then hope they responded. I mean, it obviously makes
Speaker 1: more sense to do this carpet bombing approach from the
Speaker 1: spammers point of view. From our point of view, it's
Speaker 1: really obnoxious and it's downright malicious in some cases. And
Speaker 1: I really wish you'd cut it out, you darned spammers.
Speaker 1: I think you told them, Yeah, that'll show them. I'll
Speaker 1: show them up. I'm I'm spammed out. Yeah, I'm sorry
Speaker 1: to say that there's not an easy solution to the
Speaker 1: spam problem. Uh, you know, short of not using email,
Speaker 1: or at least sharing your email address with people. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, because it's it's a very cool invention. But um, yeah, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the spammers kind of get the best of just about
Speaker 1: every spam filter one way or the other. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I said, stick with something like Gmail. Use the
Speaker 1: spam filters, you know, identify stuff with spam if it
Speaker 1: does come through. Occasionally check your spam folder. Make sure
Speaker 1: that you know you didn't accidentally miss a message from someone. Um.
Speaker 1: I think out of all of them, it's probably the
Speaker 1: most reliable. Uh, I mean, but any of them really
Speaker 1: work pretty well. You just have to You just have
Speaker 1: to use them to the full extent. Yep, yep. So well,
Speaker 1: I guess that just about wraps it up and brings
Speaker 1: us back round again to listener maim have a really
Speaker 1: bad feeling about this. You should this one's form more.
Speaker 1: I know you guys aren't the high ku type, but
Speaker 1: stuff you should know isn't taking them anymore. Space pen
Speaker 1: is bullpoo more objects work just as well. These are
Speaker 1: called pencils. Have a good day, watch out for zombies,
Speaker 1: and remember that when life stinks, use their freshener. Your
Speaker 1: dedicated listener, Mori uh Plett. Would you like to address
Speaker 1: more and explain why pencils may not be as good
Speaker 1: as a space pen if you are in a space environment. Uh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know this comes if you weren't listening at the time.
Speaker 1: This comes from an episode of our podcast in which
Speaker 1: we talk about inventions that we see every day that
Speaker 1: came from NASA's need to make stuff work when not
Speaker 1: in the Earth atmosphere. And one of them that I
Speaker 1: think is cool is the space pen, which is a
Speaker 1: pressurized pen. It doesn't work exactly like your ballpoint because
Speaker 1: you can actually use it in an a non oxygen
Speaker 1: aated environment like space. Um and uh what more you
Speaker 1: say ing is well, sure it's not a pen, but
Speaker 1: you can accomplish the same thing with a pencil, which
Speaker 1: uh more, if you're listening, I have two things. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so if you're in the Earth's atmosphere, you can use
Speaker 1: a regular ballpoint pen or a pencil. I'll give you that.
Speaker 1: But in space, if you are on a NASA mission
Speaker 1: and you need to write in space, a pencil would
Speaker 1: work until you break the point off and it floats
Speaker 1: around the capsule and hopefully not into your eye or
Speaker 1: some other very system piece of equipment, right, and uh
Speaker 1: you know, say it doesn't, it's still gonna wear down eventually. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Heaven help you if you have to sharpen it, because
Speaker 1: where do the shaving is gonna go? Yeah? There you go.
Speaker 1: So so, yeah, you've got a point. You've got a point.
Speaker 1: I see your point. And no, it's not the sexiest
Speaker 1: piece of technology ever, but the space pen in this
Speaker 1: case is kind of a cool invention. Don't don't let
Speaker 1: them fool you. Pult is like panting at the mention
Speaker 1: of the space pen. I don't even own one, No,
Speaker 1: but he covets them. I can see it in his eyes.
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Speaker 1: You know what stuff you should know? They got a
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