I am worried that a lot of what I write these days is going to be “old man yells at cloud” type of content. But this little rant does lend itself to this fascinating theory of the dead Internet. Not the whole secret cabal doing it, but the idea that the Internet is now mostly populated by bots.
More importantly, it is a warning about over automating. At least if you care about people’s sanity.
As you know, I am a boomerang employee. Back at the firm I worked for ten years prior.
Recently, before my return, they changed names and email domains. So, back in the day, my email address was jkunkel@old-domain.com. And now it’s jkunkel@new-domain.com. (I know, it’s not that hard to figure it out.)
To maintain consistency and communication, old-domain.com emails still come in and are forwarded to the new-domain.com email accounts. So my ten-year-old email address is “active” and sending messages my way.
But, it’s been turned off for a decade now. It was not an active address, kicking back “Account doesn’t exist” warnings if anyone… or anything… sent something that way.
Imagine my surprise when I opened my shiny new Inbox to find a slew of emails, dating back to when my new account was started back up. Doing some digging, it turns out that none of those emails were sent to new-domain.com… they were all sent to old-domain.com.
All of it was SPAM.
For the last ten years automated mail servers have been sending junk mail to a dead account. No confirmation. No clean up. Just throwing junk out into the Internet.
I’ve already written about the inherent desire for automation with people attracted to this work, and how that might be problematic. Add a continual stream of garbage as another reason that you need to consider all the angles before you build an automatic system, turn it on, then walk away.
Design Tech Field Guide 