terminology update
Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 4:01 am
I just did a vanity web search and found where someone was petitioning a disposable email domain list service (used by others to block sign-ups with email addresses from the listed domains) to remove the spamgourmet domains -- the list maintainers refused, but wow the guy (or gal) fought hard - I was impressed. (I was also depressed that Larry Seltzer's 2002 review that got so much wrong about our service is still haunting us 15 years later - one such falsehood was quoted [and even still misunderstood] by the list maintainer as a reason for keeping us on the list. Jeez Larry!)
Anyway, haters gonna hate - I doubt our proponent could have said anything to convince these folks to take us off the list, but according to the list maintainers, it was completely dispositive that we styled ourselves as a 'disposable email' service.
That took me by surprise - I guess I was using that term before it was uncool. I'm sure I wasn't the first one to think of the term, but when I did, I thought I might be, because I didn't hear it anywhere else. And it seemed pretty cool to me in 2000.
(As many of you know, we were not the first of these services, as I came to find out soon enough. I also learned that people had been using the term 'disposable email' to refer to services like hotmail and yahoo for some time before I thought of it)
For a long time, my benchmark on how well the site was doing was to search google for 'disposable email' and see how far up the list it was. For years, we held the number one spot! Then a bunch of other services came around, and grabbed the superior positions. I tried to SEO-ize the site for a little while, but gave up on that pretty quickly, and it fell further and further down the page, and onto the second, etc. I cared less and less - but still held a special regard for the term 'disposable email'
But reading that dialog, I could see how the term has taken on a negative connotation. Our proponent argued strenuously that we didn't fit a multi-point definition of a 'disposable email' service - the points were all sort-of-bad things, and things we designed out of our service to keep it from being abused from the very beginning. But in the end, the list maintainer shut down the conversation, because, after all, we proudly called ourself one right at the very top of the page.
To be clear, I'm completely unfazed that the list maintainers were disparagingly calling us a 'disposable email' service. Rather I was struck by how our defender was arguing so forcefully that we weren't one.
So - I'm cured - I spent a few minutes removing that distasteful term from the website, and now our addresses are called what most of you have been calling them all along: 'spamgourmet addresses', or, with only slightly more usefulness, 'auto-creating addresses'
(I'm not in love with it, btw, but I'm also not interested in trying to create a new categorical term, not after that )
Anyway, haters gonna hate - I doubt our proponent could have said anything to convince these folks to take us off the list, but according to the list maintainers, it was completely dispositive that we styled ourselves as a 'disposable email' service.
That took me by surprise - I guess I was using that term before it was uncool. I'm sure I wasn't the first one to think of the term, but when I did, I thought I might be, because I didn't hear it anywhere else. And it seemed pretty cool to me in 2000.
(As many of you know, we were not the first of these services, as I came to find out soon enough. I also learned that people had been using the term 'disposable email' to refer to services like hotmail and yahoo for some time before I thought of it)
For a long time, my benchmark on how well the site was doing was to search google for 'disposable email' and see how far up the list it was. For years, we held the number one spot! Then a bunch of other services came around, and grabbed the superior positions. I tried to SEO-ize the site for a little while, but gave up on that pretty quickly, and it fell further and further down the page, and onto the second, etc. I cared less and less - but still held a special regard for the term 'disposable email'
But reading that dialog, I could see how the term has taken on a negative connotation. Our proponent argued strenuously that we didn't fit a multi-point definition of a 'disposable email' service - the points were all sort-of-bad things, and things we designed out of our service to keep it from being abused from the very beginning. But in the end, the list maintainer shut down the conversation, because, after all, we proudly called ourself one right at the very top of the page.
To be clear, I'm completely unfazed that the list maintainers were disparagingly calling us a 'disposable email' service. Rather I was struck by how our defender was arguing so forcefully that we weren't one.
So - I'm cured - I spent a few minutes removing that distasteful term from the website, and now our addresses are called what most of you have been calling them all along: 'spamgourmet addresses', or, with only slightly more usefulness, 'auto-creating addresses'
(I'm not in love with it, btw, but I'm also not interested in trying to create a new categorical term, not after that )