Open, Please – Epilogue

This epilogue to the “Open, Please!” blog posting is based on feedback from a Canadian reader who agrees that overly aggressive marketers intrude on our private lives, but feels there is a “rub”. He says that if you “filter” your email or snail mail without actually opening it, you will occasionally miss something very important. While I agree that something important might be overlooked in the very short term, I have concluded for me that the time, effort, and cost to examine the 80% of incoming mail which is spam is hard to justify on any basis. 

The Canadian reader offers up an example of the difficulties that can be encountered if in fact you do miss something important. Three years ago, his insurance broker decided to move all their home insurance clients to a new insurer.  I suspect that the original contract gave the insurer the right to do this under certain circumstaces. The new insurer, sent a letter describing payment terms, asking for credit card information, etc.  Since the Canadian had no prior experience with the new insurer, he assumed their letters were junk mail and discarded the letter and subsequent dunning notices. Meanwhile the Canadian cancelled his insurance policy for other reasons. Following this his bank was informed him that the house was no longer insured, and sent a letter informing him that his mortgage was being cancelled for not having kept his insurance current. 

The Canadian’s point was that physical mail has some legal standing that email does not and that spammers rely on this perception to get us to open their physical mail. Actually, if there is a need or desire to use phycial mail for something “important” that would support the rationale for certified mail, Fedex, etc. A number of profitable multi-billion-dollar overnight delivery businesses have been built based on the need for physical delivery of letters.

I find it hard to justify the physical delivery of a letter. At the same time, I find it nearly impossible for anyone to say that they have not missed any “important” when they install filters. My theory has always been that if there is something really important I am trying to get to someone, that there are other means. Asking a friend of the recipient to forward a copy of the information, for example, or even resorting to the telephone. If you have something really important to get delivered, you will find a way. If your goal is to deliver 25,000,000 mails about how to strike it rich or modify human body parts, then I have no sympathy.

Open, Please!

As more and more things move to email and the web, financial services companies are showing signs of advertising frustration. Since their email gets blocked by our spam filters or we just hit the delete key, they continue to rely on paper mailings. Solicitations to take out a loan, get an investment advisor, set up a new credit card, or change insurance policies abound. The strategy they deploy is to entice you to open their envelope. The techniques vary from innocent to tricky to bordering on mail fraud.

An envelope with a return address of State Farm Insurance in Monroe, Wisconsin looked harmless and very business oriented. There was nothing printed on the back of the envelope. I fell for it and opened the envelope and it was from a local State Farm agent in Connecticut. It was obviously given a return address that did not look it was a local agent.

An envelope from American Express Cardmember Services looked very official. It had a small plastic window behind which were the words “Reminder Notice”. It was printed on a background that looked like a check. At the bototm of the back of the envelope an outlined box contained “You may have recently discarded a similar notice. Please open”. I knew it was a promtion but was curious enough to open the envelope. It was a reminder notice to order their 2009 Appointment Book and Executive Organizer. If you read the details you find out it is a trap to get you to take these for “free” plus shipping and then you will get them every year for approximately ten times the price of the promotion. If you decide you don’t want the suceeding year products you have to take the initiative to send them notice. I would call it a trap.

Many are much more aggressive in their attempts to mislead. One recent envelope said simply “Explanation of Benefits” on the back of the envelope . Explanation of Benefits forms (EOBs) are sent by payors (mostly insurance companies) to both their enrollees and to providers. The
EOBs contain information about claim payments and patient responsibility. This envelope turned out to be from Forbes and inside was an “explation of benefits” for those who subscribe to Forbes Magazine. While not legally fraud, the envelope was misleading at best.

I have adopted the practice of assuming a letter is marketing material unless I know it contains something I have been expecting or is from someone I trust. With more and more e-billing and electronic bill payment, there is not much “real” mail anymore. As email protocols and authentication continue to evolve, most really important things will be communicated by email.

IBM Happenings: September 2008

The month of September was a month, as usual for IBM, filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. Included was the revelation that IBM scientists had unlocked the secret of the Kondo Effect. The scientists at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California have forged many breakthroughs over the years.

The Almaden center, which is set on 690 acres in the foothills above Silicon Valley, has a rich history of technical inventions including the disk storage drive, the relational database, and a bevy of innovations in nanotechnology and spintronics.

The latest breakthrough from Almaden’s staff of 400 researchers and visiting staff is that they have unlocked the "Secret of the Kondo Effect". If you haven’t heard of the Kondo effect, you are not alone. Scientists around the world have been studying the intriguing phenomenon in fundamental
physics for decades. The Kondo effect is one of the few examples in physics where many particles collectively behave as one object. Clear as mud? For me too, but discovery of how this works represents a major advance in the understanding of some fundamental physical phenomena and it may have a major impact on the development of future nanoscale magnetic devices. What that means is that our mobile phones will have more storage capacity than large computers do. Assuming that Internet bandwidth continues to expand it will mean that a vast amount of the world’s data will be stored in clouds.

Complete index of IBM Happenings