CMcL

The Tales of the BossLady are entries from a private journal I used to keep in which I documented the vagaries of a certain Realtor who was my boss a number of years ago. These entries are presented here as I originally wrote them, in the present tense and with all the eye-rolling my younger self could express in written form. Nowadays I find myself more inclined to indulge people like BossLady, but back then I was less tolerant of the clue-deficient.

After I redesigned the Web site for BossLady, she started wanting to make improvements. (So far, thank God, she hasn’t asked me to put any of “that snazzy blinking text” on the page.) She asked me if there’s any way to “capture” a person’s email address when they visit the site, so that she can add them to the mailing list and email them to say, “Thanks for visiting the site.”

I paused, bit my tongue, and then pointed out that no, I don’t think it’s possible to do that, and that there would be some great privacy concerns if you could do that. She asked why. Without waiting for an answer, she started yapping away about how she “heard” about ways that it might be possible to “capture” people’s email addresses when they visit because she heard that you can get their IP address, and in turn find out their ISP and get the username associated with that account at that ISP, thereby divining their email address.

It took a lot of effort for me not to roll my eyes at her while this was going on.

I tried to explain to her why this wouldn’t work, but I didn’t bother going into the fact that a lot of ISPs like AOL give out dynamic IP addresses, which wouldn’t do her the slightest bit of good. Nor did I point out that lots of people browse the Web from work, making it even more impossible to determine their personal email addresses.

Instead, I tried to convince her that just emailing someone when they haven’t asked to be emailed is a bad thing. I explained that I, as a representative of Most People, don’t want to get an email out of the blue after visiting a site saying, “Thanks for visiting.” I’d want to know who the hell gave out my email address, where’d you get it, what the hell do you think you’re doing, etc. People don’t want to be emailed unless they ask to be emailed.

I don’t think she heard me, though. She’s thinking in terms of direct marketing, which I guess I can understand — we send out all those snail mail flyers to property owners, and they certainly haven’t asked to be on our mailing list. In fact, we have gotten several calls from people asking to be removed. However, we get most of our business from those direct mailings, so I guess they are a good thing.

Email is a different animal, however. People are getting sued for spamming other people, and I don’t know if BossLady has even heard about that.

(Ultimately I created a form on the site where people can volunteer to be placed on the mailing list. We’ve had several signups already, so I think she’s mollified for the time being.)