Death by spam: lazy email marketing is killing our inboxes

It took Cory Doctorow 30 days to unsubscribe from 3,000 'legitimate' email lists - the kind of marketing that threatens to overload this critical, federated platform

Nevada's Black Rock desert is not a hospitable place when you need to check your email. At the Burning Man festival in September, I was trying to get online between dust storms, travelling between camps on the vast playa in the desert, searching for a functional antenna and trying to find enough shade to see my phone screen. Festival life was literally passing me by, on decorated bicycles, cars turned into moving art, on stilts, or just staggering by.

But when I finally found a thin Wi-Fi signal to download mail, most of what I was downloading was spam. I spent several frustrating hours looking for enough internet to get just the headers for my mail, but even reading nothing but headers, the spam outstripped my connectivity. I wouldn't have bothered checking email from a desert, but was in the middle of an intercontinental move, a bunch of time-sensitive political campaigns with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the negotiation for the sale of my next novel, and an intense discussion with my business partners at Boing Boing. In the end, I missed some pretty important stuff.