Products like the first electronic digital watch (Hamilton’s Pulsar prototype, 1970) to the first wireless remote control (Zenith Space Command, 1956) to the first handheld LED calculator (HP-35, 1972) have brought in new, compact designs of common items and have since created generations of people that simply don’t know what it’s like not to have these things.

In the process they have changed the way we do things; the way we create, problem solve and in many respects, live.

Apple had several hits in this timespan. Here are five products that came from Apple that changed the way we do things today.

LaserWriter (1985)

Desktop publishing wouldn’t exist – or at least, would be years and years behind had it not been for the LaserWriter. On the shoulders of changes in how type is used on computers by both professional designers and home publishers, Apple introduced the LaserWriter printer in 1985. The LaserWriter was not the first laser printer (three had come before it), but it was the first available for the Macintosh.

What made the LaserWriter a true innovation was it’s use of Adobe’s PostScript interpreter, a language that controls page description for the computer. PostScript in the LaserWriter defined fonts as an outline, which let John Q. Public now have almost complete creative control over rotation, size, position and fonts on the page. It could tackle complex pages unlike any other mass market competitor, letting the publisher lay out pages with bitmap & vector images and outline fonts… all at high resolution. The LaserWriter also touted 8 pages a minutes (egads, how speedy!) and printed at 300dpi, and set a standard in industrial design with it’s small, sleek form-fitting case.

After a while, the competition began using PostScript and Apple’s lead in the printer business was minimized to the point they stopped making printers altogether in 1999.

Nonetheless, the era of Desktop Publishing ushered in by Apple with this single device had arrived.

PowerBook 100 (1991)

Design innovations brought about by the PowerBook 100 are industry-standards we accept today. Prior to this single laptop, notebook computers were heavy, clunky things reserved for computer geeks (geeks who would have to work out and stay beefy in order to carry them around).

The PowerBook 100 brought us one single thing that’s just the way things are now: It moved the keyboard up under the screen. In the space where the keyboard used to be (at the front edge of the machine) they put a trackball, and later trackpad. Within months, most other laptops boasted this same layout.

Nowadays, we simply accept this as the way it is. Uniformly, across the board, this is how a laptop should be built.

PowerBook 500 (1994)

This machine heralded a lot of changes that are now in common use industry-wide. The PowerBook 500 had the first touch pad (in that space now available in front of the keyboard, thanks PowerBook 100), the first expansion bay, the first stereo speakers on a laptop, the first smart battery that communicated it’s charge status to the operating system itself. And, just for the eyes the first curved case.

This machine single handedly set the trend for a decade of laptop design and set the technology bar for laptops forever.

Despite bringing in many years of trendy, curvy laptop cases, Apple would later go back to the early days of laptop looks. Notebooks from Apple in the early 21st Century had gone back to the squared style of yore.

iPod (2001)

Mobile music had existed long before the first iPod sold. Digital music had been available for three years before it (Diamond Rio 300, from 1998), but the iPod made mobile music ubiquitous. Granted it took a while to catch on, a problem which Apple tried to solve by also marketing the iPod as a portable hard drive. Along came the Shuffle, the Mini (now Nano) and Touch.

The iPod made it popular to take your music with you. It created the soundtrack for your day (to the detriment of a little human interaction, however). Other companies have tried to dent it’s success, and have only achieved status as second-rate devices – even as their quality and functionality is not in doubt. For most people, there is simply the iPod and No iPod.

Ironically, trends toward touch screen devices have prompted some to speculate the iPod Classic (as it’s now called) is on the brink of extinction.

iPhone (2007)

It isn’t up for argument that Apple was the first to produce a touchscreen handheld device (they weren’t), but the original iPhone in 2007 changed the way we use smartphones today – some have said it made smartphones smart. The iPhone was derided by critics for only having one button (most cell phones until then had more buttons than a late-model Countach had vents). The original iPhone put emphasis on software that runs the device, not the hardware it’s on. Following the success of the iPhone, other big players entered the market, with both popular handsets and operating systems.

It may not have been the first, but few can argue it was the game changer that brought us what we take for granted today.

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

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Read the article on Creative Overflow ❯

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

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It strikes me that as a designer and writer for design-centric magazine it would be fitting to write an homage to the person that shaped so much of what the modern world simply takes for granted. These may be pros and cons depending on your obsession and viewpoint, but they are things that, ten years ago, would be met with disbelief. And yet, as futuristic as Apple’s products so often are, it is one singular item that makes them work so flawlessly – design. And it is this very aspect of Apple’s products that makes Steve Jobs the great influence he was in the world – because the products he meticulously created have shaped the way the world accesses and uses technology to share information, and the way it creates art. Much of the way we access and share that information in a mobile world is due to Steve, from the GUI to the shape of modern laptops, from everyday touch interfaces to phenomenal speech recognition.

Steve may be recounted in coming days as a great speaker, a great visionary, a great leader, great organizer, etc – and indeed he was perhaps all those things – but one thing Steve was above all else was a very keen and gifted designer. An artist.

Design and art takes many forms; painting, figure skating, chess, but the greatest art is one that inspires and motivates others, one that helps other designers create and realize their own visions. Apple’s computers, music players, and cellphones have dramatically altered the modern age: Products that seemed to come from science fiction, Steve and the company he started gave us as everyday tools: Tools that help us create and design. Tools that help us fulfill our own vision, as designers, artists and writers.

I remember that Steve Jobs was just a man, but as designers we owe much to the vision Steve held throughout his life. Art and information has become much, much more accessible due to that vision.

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

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Granted, you may find it easy to copy the style of a writer you personally like, and there’s no doubt that the type of material you and I read has a great deal to do with how we write and/or design in return, but there is a way to find you own voice to do that – there’s nothing wrong with trying to emulate a tone of a successful writer, for example, but you have to draw limits as to how close you’ll actually get to simply mimicking or parroting someone else.

Find Your Own Inspiration

The first point is really the starting point for it all – inspiration is the lighter fluid on the grill of writing… you can go on to grill whatever you want once you get all fired up. Finding your own source(s) of inspiration is good for a few reasons.

• It lets you control your own thoughts You don’t have languish through a thousand and one RSS feeds to find that One Inspired Idea (even though it’s lifted in/directly from someone else) that makes a gripping read.
• It teaches you to rely on yourself for ideasYou make yourself responsible for finding content to write about, and invariably if you do this it will not only make your blog unique by default it will help you train your mind to detect topics that might be ignored.
• You never have to run out of stuff to create Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. If you train your mind to find the topics that will populate your blog, you give yourself sustainability. You make yourself – train yourself – to become capable at discovering those topics.
• You aren’t confined by what someone else does This means not doing a “37 Best Firefox Plugins” article just because a few other writers did. If you insist on a plugins article, say it in your own voice, from your own perspective. How have they helped you in a tight project? How do they improve your workflow?

Pump Off The Rusty Water

There are days, and every creative person has them, when you have half-baked ideas that are too good to ignore but not good enough to become fleshed out into whole projects or complete designs. Often, these ideas crown out the better ones just below the surface.

Rather than discarding these ideas when they come along, get them down – either on paper or on screen. Space is cheap, and unlike notebooks (the spiral-bound wood-pulp kind, not the machined aluminum kind) doesn’t take up a whole lot of space the more you fill it. As many ideas as you have, open your notebook (either kind) and get it down. Some people (I believe it’s Danny Gregory who coined the phrase) call this “Pumping off the rusty water” because when you drill a well or let it sit stagnant for a time, the top fills up with the stuff that’s almost no good… and before you can get to the good stuff you have to pump off the rusty water (the not-so-good ideas) first.

This is good for finding your voice because it not only helps you get into the habit of getting the ideas from your head to the paper or screen, it helps you get to know your own creative process. This means that when the times comes for the Really Good Idea (or just a fast deadline) you can better understand what your process is to be productive and to get results.

Understand The Tools You Use

It takes time and practice to become well-enough acquainted with a tool to just sit down and let things happen – without having to think or re-teach yourself how to do something. For example, if you have this fantastic idea for a logo and need to get it into the computer, do you understand the Pen Tool enough to whip up a quick sketch of how it looks?

We learn how to use a pen from the moment we’re able to grip one of those big baby crayons (those Yankee Stadium-sized hot dog ones) we start learning to handle a pen – so when the time comes to jot a note or doodle a design it comes natural enough to just pick up the pen and “open the gates,” so to speak. Having an equally comfortable knowledge of the software you use is the much the same – whether this is Photoshop, Illustrator, or GIMP (…did I just include GIMP on ThisIsInspired? O_o). Or Coda. Whatever tool(s) you use, try to make yourself as easy with it as possible, not only in the basics but in some of the way cooler, more advanced ways as well; there are tutorials a-plenty for it all there’s no excuse not to.

Be Content With Your Own Style

Don’t become so bogged down on what others do – either their topics, their style, or their success – that you lose the focus on who you are, who you want to become, and what you want your blog to be.

Trying to force yourself to be something you’re not is a waste of effort, time, and vision. Not to mention if you really rip someone off you can be slapped with plagiarism. Know what you want to do, and where you want to be – and then take only the steps you need to so your blog gets there in the end. The energy you save in not taking unnecessary steps can be directed into improving your social connection, your readership, and your reach.

Leave Competition At the Door

Creative things have very little room for competition, really. Talent, yes, maybe, but creativity cannot be forced. Comparing yourself to someone else is detrimental because in most people’s minds they’ll be that good. I’d love for ThisIsInspired to have the readership of Fabio Sasso’s Abduzeedo, but I don’t obsess over becoming Abduzeedo because we do entirely different things – and even if I wanted it to, ThisIsInspired would never in a million years be able to match him. He has his own voice and this blog has it’s own, whisper-like as it might be at this point.

My point is if you can’t match someone else verbatim, and you can’t no matter how hard you try, why compare yourself to them? Your effort is much better spent finding your own way your own way. In the end, you have richer experiences with which is help your readers and better fodder for topics and articles.

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

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Now, many major websites make use of completely alternate versions of their sites so they are more mobile-friendly – which is very admirable. Necessary, even, for such big players as CNN, BBC, and Endadget – where, if you can improve your pageviews by even a fraction of a percent it equals many dollars extra in advertising revenue or just overall use (as opposed to those same visitors going to your competitor.)

There are also WordPress plugins that will magically, twinkle-your-nose-ically turn your blog into a mobile version. There can be some problems with these versions of a site though – notably, the uniform look of any site that makes use of that same plugin or even malfunctions of basic features altogether. I won’t delve into this topic since it might take a while.

However, for those who don’t want to run an “Everybody and His Brother Can Use It” plugin or who don’t wish to redevelop their entire website (rethinking even navigation patterns and content) for mobile users, there are a few handy tips that we can all make use of that will make the “desktop” version of our website more mobile-friendly.

Let’s consider each of those now, keeping in mind we’re not talking about strictly mobile versions – we’ll be examining ways to make regular-screen websites work better on a small-screen device. So, as you read think regular sites where you “zoom in to read” not Atkins Diet “over simplified, bare bones” types of websites.

Optimizing your images gives back to your users – a lot of mobile users are paying for how much data they use – so the less data they use on your site, the better.

Optimize Images Appropriately

Optimizing your images gives back to your users – a lot of mobile users are paying for how much data they use – so the less data they use on your site, the better. And, of course, the faster the site loads (which is of course true regardless of the machine you view it on.)

We already optimize in Photoshop when we export, but there are applications available that compress a PNG even more, without noticeable loss of quality. A few bytes here, a few bytes there and it can add up very quickly. You may not think there’s much of a difference between a logo image that’s 15kb and one that’s 10kb, but look at the ratio – the second is 33% less for the user to load, or switched around, if you don’t optimize the same image is 50% larger. It’s worth the few minutes it takes to make sure you correctly compress the images.

Also, pay attention to specific image file types – GIFs handle blocks of colour better, JPGs are suited to more photographic images. PNG is the only one that really “gets” transparency, but it does tend to be fatter than a JPG of the same graphic. Don’t be afraid to use all three different types on your design. Find a balance between ease of developing, ease of updating, and ease of browsing – don’t just batch every image in a predetermined format.

Avoid Tricky Coding That Can Hang Some Mobile Browsers

Some of the fancy scripting and CSS we’re starting to see around doesn’t always work uniformly in mobile environments. When in doubt as to whether the script or technique in question will work, don’t use it in the mobile version or at least don’t let the design and navigation depend on it.

Stay away from those Front-Line CSS3 techniques until you’re sure they’ll be consistently supported in mobile browsers.

Utilize Larger Clickable Areas on Primary Links

Even if you don’t make the text in a link any bigger, you can pad out the space surrounding such links to make them easier for those people without delicate, pointy fingers to tap. Giving your links extra space is in fact just good practice all the way around.

This doesn’t mean make all your links an inch square on the screen, but if you have 12px text link, pad it up so the tap area (or click area, if you prefer) is more akin to 16px to 20px text. Again, this doesn’t mean make them ginormous but make them easier to hit when you’re poking through a website.

Don’t Cram Links Too Closely Together

Another thing to consider here, close related to the point above, is to give your links some space – so even if you absolutely can’t afford to make them easier to hit with a fingertip, at least the user won’t be tapping the wrong links by mistake and wasting their time.

There’s nothing quite so irritating when you browse a site on your iPhone only to keep hitting the wrong links because either (a) your finger is too doggone plump to land accurately, or (b) the links are too miniscule to nail even if you have normal fingers. This is not the case of “hitting the broad side of a barn” – if the link is only twelve pixels high, the likelihood of missing it altogether isn’t so uncommon – which further soaks up a users bandwidth if s/he is paying per kilabyte.

Attach A Mobile Stylesheet, Within Reason

It is possible to serve a specific stylesheet to smallscreen users – this article isn’t against that at all; however, just because you’re attaching a different CSS file doesn’t mean you have to completely re-do the site. The alternative stylesheet may just specify different widths for the same layout, or use a larger font for better legibility. Or, it tones down or removes completely any AJAX scripting you have on the desktop version of the site.

Keep In Mind Mobile Use Patterns

Mobile users tend to be more aware of their browser interface, the app itself – in this case, perhaps they rely more on the Back Button than they otherwise would in the desktop version of the site. If this is the case, can the navigation on your mobile site stylesheet be simplified (within reason)? Again, there is a balance to be found in how you go about simplifying the navigation.

Some mobile websites use a drop-menu for primary navigation, and keep it persistent at the top of the page. This is a fantastic idea if you can pull it off within the scope of the design. The reason this is good is because when the main navigation is persistent is it both easy to use (see the points above on target area for clicking links) and there’s no double-zooming: You don’t have to zoom in to read the content, zoom out to see the full page, and scroll up to get to the navigation. It’s just there, ready to use and easy to understand.

Keep It Consistent

If you do make use of a different look for your mobile site, jump through hoops to keep them looking similar enough so the user doesn’t get lost of confused. Make sure they know it’s still you. This means keeping graphical treatments the same, keep colour schemes the same, basic functionality, etc. Everything that makes your website your website. Don’t lose the look in translation.

- – -

On Audience Size & Readership

The size of your audience and number of readers has a strong bearing on which path you choose – to trim down your full screen site or develop an entirely separate version. BBC.com has an entirely different version for their mobile readers – as does any site with a large readership. In this case, it’s a numbers game, and by making it even a fraction of a percent easier to read for a percent of a fraction of your readers they can field noticeable results (eg, if you have a million readers, 0.1% is still quite a lot.)

The bottom line is to think practical when you develop your site. It can be as simple as building a normal site, then attaching a small screen stylesheet that simple makes the text all around an EM bigger – same widths, same layout, but easier to read and navigate.

It’s one of those minor things that takes relatively little time to do, and can potentially have a nice impact on how we appear to our users, making it easier and smoother for them to access the information we present.

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

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Yes, It’s Too Good to Be True

It would be wonderful if all publicity was good publicity, right? You make a product or deliver a service, do the best you can even though it might have a few choice inherent flaws, and you get people talking, right? They may not be saying nice things about you, but hey, buzz is buzz, right? At least they’re not talking about your competitors, right?

Wrong. When I say that It’s Too Good To be True, what I mean is this: The only truth in saying “All Publicity is Good Publicity” or “There’s No Such Thing As Bad Press” is the extent to which a company goes to remedy the situation.

The only truth in saying “All Publicity is Good Publicity” or “There’s No Such Thing As Bad Press” is the extent to which a company goes to remedy the situation.

If you have a problem with a product or service, you’re getting (bad) buzz about it, how you respond is vital to the truth of those sayings. We’ll call it the “BP Factor” – “BP” being “Bad Publicity” (BP also the acronym for that oil company responsible for the small drop of an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which was a PR nightmare.) You either have a problem that is catastrophically awry – in which case there’s no saving you and the only fit response is to man up, ‘fess up or go belly up – or you have a problem that can be leveraged into a Bad-Press-cum-Good Press situation. I have two experiences to share – the first is bigger than one man and the second is my own experience with a small software company.

About Small Cupholders & British Imports

I read this experience years ago in a motoring magazine – some minor details may be amiss – for this I apologise. Regrettably, I have been unable to find the original story online and so therefore I have omitted the brand name.

Experience No. 1 is a little something that happened to a small car when it was first introduced here in the United States from it’s native Europe. The vehicle introduced their new model and it was highly desirable. Sporty, British to the hilt, fun, relatively good MPG, and full of memories and…. and tiny cupholders. The cupholders worked great in Europe, the original market. But, they failed to take into account that some cups in the States are bigger, ergo, those teensy cupholders in Europe wouldn’t cut it here in the US. Well, once America started getting out on the road with these new cars they soon realized the cupholders were a bit small for their on-the-go mugs, which was mildly disturbing. It’s not a deal-breaker for the carmaker by any means, and many folks gladly sacrificed a coffee mug for the sporty vehicle with the Union Jack roof, but it did start getting some buzz – buzz in the BP sense. It was one of those things that the longer you had it, the more mildly irritating it became. Again, not to everyone who owned one, but to those few who voiced their opinions.

Now, the carmaker was presented with a golden opportunity, and having one of the best PR departments in the world, they turned the problem on it’s head and made that saying “Any Publicity Is Good Publicity” very, very true indeed.

They got cupholder adapters – a little thingamajig that turned your tiny European cupholder into an Everything’s Big In Texas cupholder. It had a small bottom that fit into the existing cupholder, but then widened out at the top becoming a big cupholder. They then provided these to the people who bought one of the new cars. Now, it’s still irritating that you have to use an adapter for your Venti Vanilla Bean Frappuccino, but now you knew you had a company who cared about you, even in the small ways. It established a rapport with customers, initiated a loyalty to the brand, and got quite a bit of Good Press – turning a bad situation on it’s head.

This is an excellent example of that moment of choice when a bad PR move could tarnish your brand and good one, even in a bad situation, make it shine.

Contrast that with the next experience.

A Screengrabber is Only As Good As It’s PR

A small product and whose sole purpose is to snip screenshots was one of those small, niche apps like Chicken of the VNC or Bowtie that (initially) did it’s job very well. I am withholding the name because I do not wish to deliberately further bad publicity (how about that!). I considered purchasing this software, but then saw it available in MacHeist that year and thought, “Why pay when I can wait a bit and get it in the MacHeist bundle?” So, I waited. I got it, and for over a year or so it ran like a well-oiled little machine – snip-snip here, snip-snip there, here a snip, there a snip, and everything’s peachy. It had FTP uploading so I could host my own snipper service instead of using their servers. I loved it, I recommended it to friends, who then proceeded to go get it for themselves and also loved it.

Then, the house of cards came down: One day (without any warning whatsoever) it simply stopped working. My account had been closed – I tried the password reset, which promptly told me my email address was not on file (even though I had a legitimate license for the software under that very address) and the one feature I loved about it – FTP uploading – was locked out because I didn’t have the right type of the account. Now, having received no email or notice whatsoever from the developer, and not being aware they even had a blog (which is very tricky to find from their website) I tweeted about being locked out of the service despite having an official license for it, and how I had to use a competing service, CloudApp.

What I got was a snippy, very unprofessional reply accusing me of starting rumours and spreading lies (from the head of the project, no less O_O) – nothing even quite so businessly [sic, again] formal as, “How can we help?” or “What seems to be the problem?” It was assumed beforehand that I was simply a troll of sorts, and giving a bad name to the company – whose product, by the way, I very much loved. I told them I didn’t really appreciate the assumptions on my motives, to which I received an even snippier reply about them not appreciating my opinion, either.

I had a similar experience with the makers of a popular HTML editor, but they responded professionally and immediately took the issue to private email, rather than public Twitter.

- – -

I know it’s small in grand scheme of things, and I know it’s free software, but it very strongly makes a valid point. Bad Press Is Only As Good As You Make It. Going by their official blog they’ve had a few bad experiences very similar to mine – and have responded to similar problems using profanity. The point I’m trying to make is that all press is not good press: It depends very much on how you respond to the bad press when it comes along – and you’re imperfect, I’m imperfect, we’re all imperfect, so it will come at some point.

Again, the truth of the saying “All Publicity Is Good Publicity” is only as true as you make it.

Step One Invariably Leads to Step Two

The problem with folks talking about you – in the BP sense – is that it will 99% of the time lead to them talking about alternatives to you: Your competition. And while, yes, your competition may have a few choice inherent flaws also, they most likely don’t have the same flaws, and so what sticks out like a sore thumb to one person might not to the next; the result being, even if the competition has a problem of their own, if it’s not the same problem, and unless the problem is built-in to the industry or genre you operate and sell in that customer goes somewhere else and is happy. Happy with your competition. Once or twice you can live with, but repeat this over and over again, such as is the case if a company’s Policy of Response says to (or not having a policy at all), and you have trouble. And these days, with the internet letting people vent their opinions to potentially thousands of readers and with Twitter and Facebook like Sherwood Forest waiting for the little matchstick of Word Of Mouth to set it aflame, you can have a very big problem very, very quickly. Bad publicity in this digital day and age can quite literally send a company to the red, especially if that company operates online, and sometimes before it even has time to respond effectively.

How To Remedy Those BP Situtations

There are a few key steps that we can take to ensure we don’t make the mistake of thinking our customers are always wrong, always out to skin us, and always trying to stab us in the back.

• The Customer is Not Always Right, But Bad Experiences Always Are. – Even if the bad experience is a PEBKAC-type problem. Resolve even minor problems as fast as you can.
• Have a Policy of Response In Place Long Before Problems Arise – Figure out ahead of time, before you even launch the product, how you and your employees will respond to these bad situations. Be detailed in this area; don’t leave any response from you to them to chance.
• Address Anything Other Than Minor Complaints In Private – Don’t Go Social on your customers, talking about problems on Twitter. For heavens’ sake, this is just stupid – you don’t want to bring any more attention to an unresolved problem than necessary.
• Treat All Complaints As Equal – They may not be, and most likely will never be equal (Password Won’t Reset isn’t quite in the same ballpark as Crashes My Computer), but address any problem seriously and let the customer know you are working to resolve it as soon as possible – it helps them realize you care.
• Never, Ever, Ever Disparage Your Customer, Not Even Behind His Back – D’oh. Just don’t do it. It casts a dark cloud over your operations and gives a place to negativity – which at the very least kills creativity and spurns workplace joy.
• Give Them More If It Makes Them Happy – If it takes an upgrade to make an unhappy customer a happy one, do it. Don’t even think twice about it. Now, you can tell the difference between a problem customer and a customer having problems. React appropriately, but politely.
• Don’t Let Bad Hair Days Interfere with Response – If you’re having a bad day, Suck It Up. Make yourself a poster in Photoshop right now with a big, flowery SIU on it and tape it over your computer. Live by it.

Bad Press Is Only Good As You Make It

I’m trying very hard not to come off as negative, but it is a pet peeve of mine that companies don’t have good customer service policies in place – policies where they could otherwise take a bad situation and make it better, where they could turn a peeved customer into a very loyal one.

I’d rather use a product that had a slight few more problems but good customer service than one that had a few fewer problems and lousy public relations.

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

No related posts.

So how to stop spam, or at least slow it down to a mere trickle? If you’re like me and you use Mail on a Macintosh computer, you’re in luck.

In former days when an address got too bogged down, I create a new one, change over all the records I could so they knew where to find me (Netflix, Amazon, etc), then wait a couple months to make sure everyone who wanted to contact me knew where to contact me, and then delete the onld one.

How naive! There is a much simpler way to deal with annoying spam.

Outside of the built-in spam filter that comes with Mail, which learns from and adapts from what mail you consistently junk, there’s an even better way – Bouncing.

The Problem With Junking & Built-In Spam Filters

The problem with junk mail filters is that they don’t block spam, they just send it packing directly to the trash. So effectively what happens is Mail could wind up junking a message you’d rather it didn’t (rarely, however.) Note, also, that simply junking spam still allows the junk to arrive in your inbox in the first place – and there’s The Problem.

Spammers work like this:

• They randomly generate tens of thousands of address at a certain domain, or
• They crawl popular websites to find email addresses – which are surprisingly common
• They then send their spam to these addresses
• In the case of generated addresses, they note which addresses are live (eg, receiving mail), and celebrate a small victory
• They then send this email address to all their spamming buddies, who then send it on to all their spamming buddies, who then send it on… you get the idea.
• Email addresses that aren’t live are chopped from the list.

Back to the Bouncing

Bouncing spam works because when you “bounce” an email, you effectively are sending the email back to the sender, with the message “This address does not exist.” It bounces the spam off your address and sends it packing. It’s kind of like a snail-mail letter being “returned to sender” because there’s no resident at a given address, or better yet there’s no such address there at all.

To bounce your junk email, simply hit the key combination Command-Shift-B (B for Bounce, get it?)

Command-Shift-B

CMD-SHFT-B

C-S-B

Now, it works because the spammer people don’t record your address – you’ve sent the message your address doesn’t exist, so they think they’ve just hit on another non-existent email address.

How Long Does It Take?

If you start getting spam, it is imperative you bounce every single message. Even one spam message allowed to get through the Outer Wall of defense waves a little red flag for the bad guys and makes them keep sending.

It may take a couple weeks of consistent, regular bouncing of all spam for you to notice – it takes a while for the message to get across.

Case in point: About twice a year, I get a wicked rash of spam. Now, I’m very cagey about my email address on the internet, so how mine got out there I have no idea (unless some shady dot-commer betrayed his promise in the EULA… to which I say, May Your Hard Drive Always Fry and Your Screen Always Have Dead Pixels.) Enter the Bouncing method. Every time, I bounce all the spam, and about three days later it slows by about half, then within a couple weeks it’s 99% gone.

I’m not saying this will work every time, and if you use Thunderbird you’re up chocolate creek w/o a popsicle stick because I’ve had nothing but trouble with Thunderbird and don’t recommend you use it.

So, may your LED screens always have backlighting and the keys rise to meet you(r fingers).

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