Having trouble reaching John Broskie of Glassware Design

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Joined 2011
SOP, he's extremely busy. Try putting TUBE - RETURN NEEDED in the subject line of the email.
Don't mail anything unless you have a return authorization though. Use sales@tubecad.com

From his website:
"Begin the subject line with "Tube"
Most of the email I receive is spam (about 6,000 a day). If I see an email subject line beginning with "Tube"
I will not delete it, whereas no subject line or one that begins with "Hey" or "Hi" or "Want to see something great?"
will be deleted."
 
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I figured he was busy. I mean no shade at him, just wasn't sure how to get through the haze :)

He just responded. Seems something did the trick. I'd tried "URGENT" and "RETURN", but not "TUBE" (since this wasn't a tube product). Out of curiosity, why is "TUBE" the magic word?

"Want to see something great?"

Oh god, no! I think that would guarantee I would never open the email! :LOL:
 
He said it's the magic word. Those 6000 emails a day are ridiculous, though I had it bad.
Ahh gotcha. I'll remember that for next time. I'm sure I'll be buying more stuff from him in the future.

Spam is insane... There's gotta be better ways to fight it, right? I dunno, I don't operate a store or anything. ***** hard, yo.

What do you do that attracts such a volume of emails? Do you have a store or such?
 
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Joined 2011
Having worked for a major university for many years, I've had an email address for a long time,
and have bought lots of expensive parts from many sources. Once you're on their email list,
they won't give up. I've had sales reps emailing/calling weekly or daily. Only a few companies will
let you unsubscribe to all that spam, and they sell all those email lists. And I won't mention the
junk emails for who knows what that I'd never read. And the blocking option never seems to work.
 
"URGENT" or "NEEDING YOUR PERSONAL ATTENTION" mails typically follow with: "We found a cardboard box in a back corridor at the National Bank of Nigeria with 6.5 MILLION DOLLARS with same surname as yours, name sadly unreadable, is that YOU?"

Or are signed by "Agent Smith from the FBI, The White House" saying you will GO TO PRISON because of improperly paid back Taxes or... or ... or ...

ANY Email Address which is "in the open" will be grabbed by Robots and added to a "to be Spammed" list.
 

PRR

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Joined 2003
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Not to spam you, but: if you subscribe to his Patreon and support his writings you get a little better access (reply to his welcome letter and he won't discard it unseen). And while I can't agree with every one of John's thoughts, it is good to keep him thinking.

I had an email address on hundreds of pages since the 1980s. I've had some strange spam. Used to be a lot of Russians. Brick cutters. Mermaids with bowling balls. Vegetable crispers. Second homes out beyond Moscow. Bootleg DVDs. I think in the fall of the USSR it was just a good business proposition (or best they could get). Especially when the Russian emailer I was using suffered a data theft. But it is equal opportunity now. Some guy claimed in Spanish that he hacked my webcam and filmed me having fun on "special sites" (and didn't notice that I use little or no Spanish when pleasuring myself under the keyboard?). (And what web-cam??) But this stuff goes around: he did know a password from 7 years ago. That may be the HomeDepot hack.
 
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Joined 2005
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Not to spam you, but: if you subscribe to his Patreon and support his writings you get a little better access (reply to his welcome letter and he won't discard it unseen). And while I can't agree with every one of John's thoughts, it is good to keep him thinking.

I had an email address on hundreds of pages since the 1980s. …
You had email in the 1980s? I was one of the first to get email in the early ‘90s when the service finally became available outside of universities, so how’d you swing that?
 

PRR

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Joined 2003
Paid Member
email in the 1980s?
Sure. It was all over AT&T, where a dear friend worked, though the magic sticks to get through the gateway were rare, and in-house they used the most annoying email client, I don't want to think of it.
At university as student and as employee email was routine in a few cliques. I was not in with the in-crowd but wangled an account. On a multi-user mini-mainframe machine barely smarter than an IBM 8088 XT (or maybe not that smart) with hundreds of computing students and some real geek staff (hi Charles!). I connected from remote campus (even from other states) with a dumb-modem and an ADM-3 terminal. Later I got an ADM-3A which had lower-case. vi in 3-line mode was the advanced email editor. (24-line mode was way too slow at 300 baud.)
---Well, grep me! Bitsavers has a full ADM-3(A) service manual!
 
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OK - But did any of us do email on teletype terminals? My neighbor in the mid 70s had a computer business in his home, mostly DEC gear. Teletype terminals were the interface. I remember he had a dial in connection to the local university computer lab, but don't remember ever sending/receiving electronic mail. Maybe we did.

As for spam, I've had my current email addresses for about 25 years and get surprisingly little spam. But I've been very careful. When my email needed to be on any of my websites, I had found a clever little script that decoded and displayed the address only after a click. The email was not normally visible to the eye and not found in the HTML. Only a click would generate the link. Even with millions of site views, my address stayed pretty clean. I believe that my email provider does a good job of filtering before it ever gets to me, which helps. 1000s a day? That's nuts.
 
At IBM in the late 70's and early 80.s we had an internal email like system called PROFS. It was a vast improvement over the previous use of telexes to communicate.
I used to travel a lot and all I had to do anywhere in the world was to log on at a spare 3270 terminal to do my job. It must have cost IBM a fortune though.
 

PRR

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Joined 2003
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AT&T's ESS telephony switcher included a well-developed text store and forward system. In 1969.
https://talkingpointz.com/the-origin-of-email/
Western Union heard of it and hit the roof. AT&T had long been under pressure for doing more than telephones so kept this early "email" an in-house secret.
1965 saw an New England time-share service where users left notes to each other, first in a common folder and later in personal MAIL folders.
https://multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html
Service managers thought this was a waste of resources.
But it worked, and carried a very early political "spam".
1977 the US Post Office heard about email and thought it could wreck their business. (Did it?)
They wanted to ban private (ie non-USPS) email, and offered their own very mis-guided service.
Political poop on all fans.
https://www.cybertelecom.org/spam/history.htmFor some reason, E-COM was a failure.

CompuServe and AOL had serviceable emails long before the unix folks took over the world. I still have a folder of 5,4 numeric addresses (AKA PPNs).