Posted on 07/04/2002 3:55:42 PM PDT by JameRetief
The INQ 4-step shafting plan for owners of free email services
The Daily Hotmail By : Thursday 04 July 2002, 18:56 LET'S SAY YOU RUN a nice, free email service, that, mainly because it free and easy, is also stunningly popular. You may have acquired the service by buying it off someone, for instance. And, of course, to keep the users happy you'd have promised to keep the site free. Which you do. Anyhow, time goes by. You see all these folk coming and going on your site. You flog some adverts to bring in some money, but all these folk coming and going for nothing starts to grate. But how do you get round that pledge to keep the service free? Try this: Step one Make users drop in once every thirty days to weed out the time-wasters. Step two Limit the size of the free space allocated to users. Step three Make users' addresses available to other users -- particularly useful to spammers. You know spammers will jump at the chance to bombard your users with junk mail that will rapidly eat up their free space. This step might be dodgy because of your own privacy pledges, so do it sneakily. Like, stick some buttons on the site somewhere that users have to unclick to avoid the spam attack. If you don't tell them they're there, they may not notice... Step four Drop this in their inboxes. Say, on the eve of July 4th: If youre taking a holiday this summer, youre probably going to stop your newspaper delivery and make sure your mailbox doesnt overflow. But dont forget there are also a few things you need to do to safeguard your e-mail account while youre away. First, you must log in at least once every 30 days. If you dont, your account will be deemed inactive and closed, and all your messages and contacts will be deleted. Second, dont let your account go over the 2MB storage limit. Inboxes have a way of filling up fast, so be sure to check every so often and delete unwanted or large messages. If you dont, the Hotmail Janitor will randomly delete messages until your account is reduced to 2MB. You can avoid the potential pitfalls of leaving your account unattended by signing up for MSN Extra Storage. For only £19.99 a year, you can take a holiday from your e-mail account, and know that all your messages will be there when you get back. That should scare the poor, unfortunate, cheapskate fools that think you can get something for nothing in this world and add to your swollen coffers. Cough up, you parasites!! µ Previous editions |
If you have a website with your email on it the robots will grab it and spread it all over hell.
The wife has a hotmail account and loves it. She filters most of the junk and what does come through is virus-checked.
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