If you made it to this page after reading about This is True in Playboy, you’ve at least proven that you do read the articles! This is True is the thinking person’s humor publication, just as Playboy might be considered the thinking person’s men’s magazine. I humbly believe Playboy agrees, since This is True and I have now been featured in their pages four five six times (no pictures, thankfully).
That Time the Playboy Advisor Asked for My Advice
In August 2008 (p37), The Playboy Advisor got a question from a reader asking about how to deal with a heavily spammed (30/day) email address. They necessarily condensed that advice in the magazine, but acknowledged “Randy Cassingham of SpamPrimer.com” as their source. Here is what I sent the Advisor, in its entirety, so he could pick which details to include himself:
Only 30 a day? D.S. should consider himself lucky — many get far more. (My main address gets 300-400 — yes, per day — but luckily the vast majority are blocked at the server level.)
There is no way to get off spammers’ mailing lists once you’re on. Asking for them to stop both confirms your address and proves to them that you open their mail. It’s like telling a robber you have cash and have no way to defend yourself — not a good idea.
It does sound like D.S.’s provider offers spam filtering (which is how they’re marked “[spam]” to begin with), and it’s just one extra step to have them delete it, rather than drop it in his inbox. But most providers don’t do that by default, since no spam filtering technology is perfect: there are false positives (mail marked as spam that’s legitimate) as well as false negatives (mail that’s spam that isn’t caught). I let my server delete any mail that’s over a certain spam score, and surely I miss some legit mail that way — but it’s a price I’m willing to pay to not see 300+ pieces of garbage. If D.S. wants his spam auto-deleted, he should ask his Internet provider to do it. If they can’t or won’t, switch to one that will.
Another alternative is to use Google’s gmail. It moves spam into a special folder so you can review it for legit mail, and autodeletes it after 30 days. Most webmail services do at least that much, but Google does it the best, and without ads that flash in your face.
The Advisor then asked, “But let me ask — is there any way to save a mailbox by turning it off for six months or a year?”
No. Since most spammers just steal resources, they don’t care about bounces. And they rarely use a “from” address that processes returns, so they don’t scrub the lists. Therefore, no: you can turn off an address for years, and the moment you turn it back on you’ll see spam. (Not a theory: have tried it!)
Other Mentions
- The first time True appeared in Playboy was when they wrote that This is True “Livens up the week with bizarre-but-true news,” and gave the URL for this site, in a rundown of fun sites. (April 1999, p30)
- Later that year, they expanded on their recommendation with a brief focused solely on the newsletter: “Funny But True: ‘This Is True’ is a syndicated newspaper column by Colorado humorist Randy Cassingham that contains bizarre news items from legitimate newspapers. (Free e-mail subscriptions are available at thisistrue.com.) It’s not rocket science, but Cassingham generated enough income to quit his job as a software engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. ‘True’ is a great place to read about Fabio getting smacked in the face by a bird, French conservative Jean-Marie Le Pen defending male nudity, and a woman who created a ceremony so she could marry herself. Cassingham’s kicker? ‘She also apparently had a hand in planning her wedding night’.” (September 1999, p20.)
- Playboy featured a larger-than-life-sized reproduction of my instantly famous Get Out of Hell Free cards. I have great fun handing them out (postal clerks and waitresses seem to especially get a chuckle when they see them). For more info on how you can have fun with them too, click here. They had a brief summary of the story of how a reader condemned me to hell, and how I retaliated.], concluding, “He has since distributed thousands of ‘Get Out of Hell Free’ cards to subscribers and friends.” Yet by that month (October 2000, p61), sales of the card had broken 70,000. Today there are well over 2 million cards in circulation.
- Playboy took up my cause about my campaign to eliminate zero tolerance rules and laws in schools. They spent nearly two pages discussing some of the cases I had written about. (November 2002, pp54-55)
- The editors also asked me to write for them about my other project at the time, the True Stella Awards which, they said, “honors those who spectacularly misuse the legal system.” I was allotted a full page to give some of my favorite case examples, so I finally had a paycheck from the famously-well-paying magazine to go with one of the first-ever rejection letters I ever got, hand-signed by their senior editor, which (alas!) has been lost over the years. (March 2003, p59)
All of These Issues of the magazine are included in the Internet Archive.
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Re spammers not cleaning their lists: I can confirm this. Several years ago, I worked for a large multinational corporation. I left to work elsewhere for a while, eventually returning to that same company some four years later.
Upon my return, I elected to use the same email address that I had used previously, and the very first item that appeared in my in-box after it was enabled – even before the auto-generated “welcome” messages – was spam!