I was just going through a frustrating exercise: we recently completed an online survey which used an iPod giveaway as a mechanism for drawing in participants. So just this morning I generated the fateful random number and selected the winner.

After writing a simple email explaining that our participant had won, I was struck with the challenge of writing a suitable title. More importantly a title that would make it through a spam filter. I originally had ‘Congratulations, iPod Winner!’ but realized that every single element of that title might set off a spam filter, even the damn punctuation. But I didn’t want to abandon the point of the message altogether - a title should relate to the content. I finally settled on a simple ‘UC Survey: Congratulations’. Of course, our winner won’t know what the kudos are for until she opens up the message - IF she opens up the message.

We are at a frustrating point where the efforts we must make to rid ourselves of spam are encroaching on our habits and making us think twice about things we’d otherwise not give a second though. That’s an awful position to be in - technology should work for us, not against us. Inboxes full of spam do seem worse to me, but that’s why we should kill all spammers.