I am singularly ill-qualified to write about electronic communication but that’s not going to stop me. Unbelievably, about twenty years ago my then employer, a major US and international insurance company that had diversified into financial services, did not provide its UK employees with e mail.
I took advice from my friend and colleague, Mark Keenan, and bought a laptop. He taught me how to switch it on (not easy for a first-timer) and use it for e mail and shopping (cigars from Spain). He set me up with a Hotmail account and you can bet that all your friends who have Hotmail are early-adopters like me. Now Hotmail has changed to Outlook and is sub-optimal. It has started behaving like a dotty, elderly aunt. It has re-filed all my e mails in the wrong folders and has hidden all the emails I have sent. It positively welcomes messages from folk keen to send me implausibly large sums of money. Sometimes it sends these sort of messages from “me” to me. It has decided that a hundred messages a day is the most I can send. So now I communicate with readers who have signed up here from my gmail account which, it seems, has no restrictions.
The spam that pours in is becoming increasingly clever. The latest is a message from Amazon confirming my purchase of a baby chair to be delivered to an address in Basingstoke later this week unless I opt to cancel the order. Of course it’s not really from Amazon and I’d be in all sorts of trouble if I replied. I think that electronic mischief, theft and fraud is a problem that can only get worse. I was told by an employee at Visa that as they introduce new safeguards to prevent fraud the miscreants have already developed ways of circum-navigating them, apparently having been given advance notice by an insider.
In the middle of December some new “languages” popped up on my Google Analytics account that tracks visitors here. It took three weeks and the help of a techie in Barcelona (thank you, Carlos) to sort the problem. One of the spam messages read “Vote for Trump!” another “Vitaly Rules Google”. Russian salad or spam?