A couple of weeks ago, I receive an email from Microsoft asking me to “help” them fight junk mail. After being in the program for three weeks, I got to the conclusion that this whole program is junk . Junk E-mail Protection Team is a cheap attempt to “crowd source” spam detection. They don’t have clear opt out options, includes address that are part of my contact list and I send emails too and there is no reference in the help or official page of the program. Finally, is not that different from when you tell Hotmail, which emails that get to your inbox are spam and when emails that go to the Junk folder and are not spam: plain redundancy.

All started when I received an email from “preventjunk@live.com that stated the following:

We hate junk e-mail as much as you do. As part of our effort to fight junk e-mail, we’re asking for a little help from our friends (that’s you!).

If you sign up to help, here’s what we’ll do: Every once in a while, we will resend one of your e-mail messages and ask you to categorize it as either junk or not junk. That’s it-one click and you’re done!

This helps us fine-tune our junk e-mail filters and protect you better. The messages that we send are your real e-mail messages; they were addressed to you, and may already have been sent to you earlier.

If you are wondering (like some people on the out there) if these is legit here is a print screen of the original message:

You may think that spammers and hackers can make emails look real, and spoof the address preventjunk@live.com, well here is an image of the header:

As you can see, Microsoft shows kind of a status bar on the top that tells you that its legit. So far, so good. The “inconvenience” starts when you sign up and start receiving emails, asking you to identify emails from people in you contact list, as spam or not. Spoofing is not an excuse for Microsoft not being able to verify if an email from the hotmail.com or msn.com domains are spam or not. The worst thing, is that if you say that is not junk, then you expect the email to appear in the inbox. That is not the case, they just put the email somewhere that it could not be found. With that one time Microsoft “miss placed” my email, I was through with the program.

I start to look for a way to opt out, the problem is that there is no option in the [options] menu. So, I went to the original email (see image above) and the only thing I see is the following:

To stop receiving messages about this program, click here.

The reason I didn’t click on there is because, at that point it wasn’t clear to me what it will happen, since they use the term “this program”. What program, there features program, hotmail or the Junk program. Also, I didn’t find any reference about this “Junk E-mail Protection Team” on the Microsoft Site or Hotmail Help. All these, added to feeling  of uncertainty. At the end I received another notification email asking me to identify if the email is junk or not. Again this email was from a trusted source, which I had wrote to before and was a reply to the initial email I sent the contact!!! It included the following message:

You’re receiving this e-mail message because you volunteered to help us stop junk e-mail. If you’ve changed your mind, you can stop participating. This is an unmonitored e-mail address.

This one seem that it will do what I expected, so I clicked on it and all was good. Tried to verify what will happened if I clicked on “Not receiving messages about this program” link and apparently it was for opting out.

Now, back to receiving emails from trusted sources. When I was searching for more information on the program, I found this funny report where an Italian blogger, enrolled on the program and shortly afterward received an email. The email asked him to identify if an email from Microsoft was junk or not. If this is not enough to label this program as “junk”, I don’t know what more they can do.

I wonder how many emails is Steve Ballmer is not receiving because they are identify as junk.

Today was like any other day, checking emails and sending emails, reading, browsing watching NBA highlights of the Sunday’s  games.

I was getting prepared to write an email and I needed to recall a address, so I did a respective search in GMAIL, which searches in all your emails (very good by the way). Suddenly I received an error in the screen, which surprised me a lot. Then I tried the search again and the same error. It was like a 705 error and mi request couldn’t be done.

Nothing was working so I closed the browser and then tried to login again, and got this error.

It was half and hour and the error continued, this was around 11:00 am Stockholm time. Then I realized how dependent I was on Webmail and if the service is down, I can’t retrieve any contacts or anything. If I was using a email client like thunderbird or outlook then at least I will have had my access to the contacts, write the email and send it. I will be able to send it because I’m guessing that the problem was on the webmail client, not on the services itself.

Yes GMAIL is BETA, but still we are dependent on companies that offer services for free that become a commodity and that we give for granted. So I’m worried of this trend (which is not getting so much hype this days but.. ) of Software as a Service (SaaS). It may sound paranoiac, but if some day Google out of the blue decides to do something drastic with its services, are we protected? Do we have a backup? Those the agreement we just accept without reading protects us ?