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Do what I do: Abandon the email function altogether, let it get 100% full with the spam mails and then leave it alone. Offline messages work just as well anyway if you need to send someone a note when he/she isn't around. Otherwise you'll be fighting a never-ending battle clearing the inbox, ignoring the spammers, getting your ignore list full and then eventually having to clear it.
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This is what I do now. I do not use the email system and clicking the Spam button for months has done nothing. It was a pointless exercise. Unfortunately, from someone else's post I now know I have a long ways before my inbox becomes full(it is currently at 80 emails), if ever.
Sounds like a challenge to broadcast in all the zones and /unhide to see who can fill their inbox first. I wonder if their is a badge for it.
1. it should definitely cost inf to send mail... not a crazy amount, but enough where if slows down spammers
2. why not send a horse via mail... hello package delivery, not everything is a letter.
3. the mail icon should only be red when there is new mail... after you read it is should go back to reg color
4. spam... there should be 2 spam filters one server side, which stops all the spam from come to my website and buy inf (which is unlimited in size and would be easy to do as once the account is perma banned for spamming it would be dropped from the list anway) and the 2nd which is a personal spam list so if you get into a fight with your ingame girlfriend you can stop incoming mail.
Some of these items are the most basic features of all halfway decent email systems and very easy to implement... our email system is no different than any other it just uses an ingame interface... but ALL the features are there
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1. it should definitely cost inf to send mail... not a crazy amount, but enough where if slows down spammers
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Sure, I can get behind this.
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2. why not send a horse via mail... hello package delivery, not everything is a letter.
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Isn't this e-mail? Are you gonna send it as an attachment?
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3. the mail icon should only be red when there is new mail... after you read it is should go back to reg color
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Yes, PLEASE!
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4. spam... there should be 2 spam filters one server side, which stops all the spam from come to my website and buy inf (which is unlimited in size and would be easy to do as once the account is perma banned for spamming it would be dropped from the list anway) and the 2nd which is a personal spam list so if you get into a fight with your ingame girlfriend you can stop incoming mail.
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This one too...in fact, taking it a step further...how about some sort of global spam list, so we don't need to individually figure out who the spammers are?
All they would have to do is give the user the options to limit email to:
- Friends
- Global Friends
- SG Members
- Alliance Members
A nice checkbox option beside each of these, and you have control over what you receive.
But I don't think it's going to happen. The spammers have to purchase an account which equals $$$ to the company.
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I also concur that making email something you can opt out of would go a long way towards solving the spam problem. Not only would a very large portion of the player base have the problem disappear the moment they disabled email, I think the minority who left it on would suddenly become far too small a market to be worth bothering with.
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Except that if they make it something that can be turned off, they'll "helpfully" add a warning to the sender that the recipient has opted out of email. Then the next step is for the spammers to grab your global handle, and send you global tells at all hours of the day or night. What do you do then?
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This. Very much so.
If you give people an option to not recieve email from people who aren't on your friends list, and you don't put in any kind of warning message telling people that their emails aren't reaching you, then RMTers will have no clue whether their emails are actually reaching their recipients or not. If they don't know that their spam is being blocked, then they might not be so likely to change their spamming strategy to something else.
And on the odd chance that they actually do start resorting to tells or broadcasts or whatnot, why couldn't they just implement an active "censor" feature that automatically blanks out the name of the offending websites, like with the swear filter, only mandatory?
And to avoid the spammers simply adding spaces or punctuation to bypass the filter, they could set it up so that the filter checks specifically for the letters of the offending sites, in order, regardless of having letters, punctuation, or spaces between them. The spammers need to be able to send out the correct web address in order to get any actual business, so they have to have all the letters in the correct order or their victims won't know where to go.
True, they could always try something weird like putting the name backwards, or garbling the letters and adding decoding instructions or something like that, but I severely doubt that anyone stupid enough to buy inf from these verminous scum is going to have the mental capacity to really figure out the name of a website if it isn't just spelled flat out.
Two wrongs don't make a right. However, three rights make a left.
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[ QUOTE ]
All they would have to do is give the user the options to limit email to:
- Friends
- Global Friends
- SG Members
- Alliance Members
A nice checkbox option beside each of these, and you have control over what you receive.
But I don't think it's going to happen. The spammers have to purchase an account which equals $$$ to the company.
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You do realize that if you couch such a suggestion in an accusation like that, it's a really good way to get ignored by the developer team?
These baseless allegations are a hot, steaming pile of [censored], and I'm really tired of seeing people, even just in passing, accuse NCsoft and/or Paragon Studios of being in collusion with RMT spammers. Anyone who doesn't realize that RMT spam drives more people away from the game than it brings RMTers in is an idiot. Anyone who also doesn't realize that NCsoft/Paragon Studios would rather have satisfied long-term players than an account that is banned after a day due to being charged on a stolen credit card is an idiot.
Get a clue. RMT spammer accounts != $$$. And if NCsoft/Paragon Studios wanted to, there is nothing stopping them from simply going SOE on us and selling the influence directly to us, making a hell of a lot more profit than simply being in silent collusion with disreputable companies. So please take that mindless drivel somewhere else.
We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)
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Anyone who doesn't realize that RMT spam drives more people away from the game than it brings RMTers in is an idiot.
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Really? Do you think anyone has actually quit over RMT spam?
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Anyone who doesn't realize that RMT spam drives more people away from the game than it brings RMTers in is an idiot.
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Really? Do you think anyone has actually quit over RMT spam?
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On its own? Probably very few.
As a fence-tipper ("I'd probably be ok with the game, but all the spam, ugh!") it's probably cumulative.
Why can't there be a "Only accept email from Friends" function in the general options section?
Seems like a pretty basic solution, to me.
/shrug
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That breaks the honeypot. If the RMT's know that such a feature exist they will choose other vectors, such as broadcast or tells, to do their spamming. I'd rather have them confined to the email ghetto.
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That breaks the honeypot. If the RMT's know that such a feature exist they will choose other vectors, such as broadcast or tells, to do their spamming. I'd rather have them confined to the email ghetto.
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I agree its a minor inconvience to just hit delete or spam or as been suggested earlier just ignore the red button, I remember the tell hell of their spams.
I can live with a little weekly house cleaning of spam. Heck they get reported anyways and then that costs the RMT money over time. 
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Just ignore the e-mail system entirely then. I personally think it's pointless because it's character based.
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Yup. Send offline global messages if you need to communicate to someone at an odd time.
I'd like to see a SG bulletin board system (something more robust than the MOTD).
I gave up on the email system a long time ago.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by eltonio
This is over the top mental slavery.
|
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Yup. Send offline global messages if you need to communicate to someone at an odd time.
[/ QUOTE ]The problem with this is that every now and then I crash upon logging in. That means that whatever tells get picked up upon logging in, I never see. The advantage of email is that it stays until you delete it (which is, ironically, also it's disadvantage when dealing with spammers).
Co-incidentally, this is why I dislike the current comments system for the AE, but that's neither here nor there.
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Trust the computer. The computer knows all.
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That breaks the honeypot. If the RMT's know that such a feature exist they will choose other vectors, such as broadcast or tells, to do their spamming. I'd rather have them confined to the email ghetto.
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So you are advocating a reason for RMTers to stay? i.e. Let them continue to reach a larger market through the use of email because they can send a greater amount when few people are on as opposed to tells or broadcasts where they are reported in real time and more likely to be banned before they reach even half the people they do now.
Ignoring email doesn't have the prospects of irritation. (Other than vapid OCD-based hatred of the tab having a red label.)
Ignoring broadcast also doesn't but it can hurt people without a large group of friends, global channels, or just newbies in general.
Ignoring tells? Yeah, I d--*Dloip*--on't re--*Dloip*--ally w--*Dloip*--an--*Dloip*--t to --*Dloip*-- go b--*Dloip*--ack t--*Dloip*--o th--*Dloip*--e cons--*Dloip*--ta--*Dloip*--nt, audib--*Dloip*--le irr--*Dloip*--itatio--*Dloip*--n th--*Dloip*--ey started wi--*Dloip*--th. --*Dloip*--
Carrying on conversations with tells also becomes a drag...
[edit] --*Dloip*--
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No, you fail to understand my point. I'm not advocating any reason for RMT to stay. They already have a reason to stay, $$$ and the players that give it to them. Lets start with a few givens that I believe are so clear we don't need to argue them:
1) The RMT's are not going away. There is money to be made here that makes it worth the effort they put in.
2) There is no cost effective way to stop them. If there was, the dev's would have implemented it.
Given these two premise, what is to be done? What I'm suggesting is that, since we know it's not going away, we find a way to minimize it's impact. So you find the vector that will be least disruptive to the players and make it the most attractive to the RMT's. I'd much rather have them fill up my inbox, where I never have to see the spam, then for them to spam me with tells, which are disruptive to my gameplay experience.
You offer no evidence that spam tells will get an account deleted any faster than spam emails, but your thinking seems to be that the RMT's can be choked off and they can be made to go away. Experience disagrees with you. The only way to make them go away is to get rid of l3wt and no one wants that.
So you are saying a person sending out 300 emails in the middle of the night can send 300 tells before they are banned?
Given your argument, why are we not seeing spammers use the /tells right now? If there is no difference in the time they are reported/banned then why avoid another avenue of marketing your product. Using your argument, it is just as attractive as email. They can hit just as large of the population as email, right?
Can you provide an explanation why they do not use tells now? Since they are not using tells now, can you also offer evidence they will return to them if we are given the option to turn off email?
You ignore premise #1, the RMT's are not going away. It's very clear that bannination holds no fear for them. It's just part of their business. I constantly have email from "empty" but that doesn't stop more from coming.
As to why the RMT's prefer email, my guess would be that they can reach multiple recipients with one email. It's easier and more efficient.
Why would they use tells if they couldn't use email? Well what do you expect them to do, exclaim "I am undone!" and go back to stitching soccer balls together for $.03 a day?
If we were given the option to turn email off, I suspect many would do it. Maybe I'm wrong, and only forumites care about this, I don't know. If their data indicated that this was affecting their sales they'd adapt. This would probably create a worst case scenario where they continued to blast spams and then would send tells.
No, I did not ignore premise number 1. You incorrectly assumed from the beginning that was what I was talking about. I'm only asking for the OPTION to turn off email. i.e. RMTers still have a market for their emails.
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Why would they use tells if they couldn't use email? Well what do you expect them to do, exclaim "I am undone!" and go back to stitching soccer balls together for $.03 a day?
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I didn't ask if they no longer had email. You proposed that RMTers were not reported/banned any differently whether they use emails or tells. Why would they give up? Not saying they would and this is not what I asked. They still have email but should be using tells as well given your interpretation of the issue.
I'm glad you said "probably". None of us know how they would behave but I do know I want this feature added. My thought is it would "probably" not be as bad as you say since it will be an optional feature.
You also say:
"If we were given the option to turn email off, I suspect many would do it."
Doesn't that say this feature is highly desired by the majority? I'm assuming majority due to your worst-case scenario. At this point there is no other reason for the Devs not to implement beyond resources, priority, technical requirements, etc. So on the one case, the majority does not use the feature thus, using some of your words, the RMTers do not notice a large drop in revenue but in the other case, we have the majority of players requesting a feature(since we are assuming I am equating the majority of players using the feature to the majority of players 'requesting' a feature). Unless by "many" you only mean more than one and not the majority, in which case we are still back to the former case where RMTers do not notice a large drop in revenue. Do you want to clarify that comment more since I'm having to make assumptions of my own from the lack of information?
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I constantly have email from "empty" but that doesn't stop more from coming.
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On that subject- I've noticed that whenever I get huge clumps of e-spams, like 80% or so of it is all from "empty". Couldn't they make it so that when a character/account no longer exists, all their sent emails are automatically wiped? It seems kind of stupid that an RMTer's spam gets to linger around long after they themselves have been ejected from the game.
Plus it would drastically reduce the number of times people would have to hit the Delete button.
Two wrongs don't make a right. However, three rights make a left.
L00k, w3'r3 r3f0rmed! W3'v3 g0t l1v3s n0w, 4nd 1'm 4 buz1n3ss Pwnz0r! -Reformed Freak Proprieter
Seek. Find. Rularuu.
Target. Destroy. Rularuu.
Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls. Rularuu.
Large_Man wrote:
[ QUOTE ]
I've noticed that whenever I get huge clumps of e-spams, like 80% or so of it is all from "empty".
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Usually, the character that sent the email has been deleted, but the account is still there, which you can verify by clicking the Spam button. If you get an error, the account's gone; if you get an ignore message (for the global account), it was just the character.
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Couldn't they make it so that when a character/account no longer exists, all their sent emails are automatically wiped?
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Not a bad suggestion, actually, but (like most things) probably extremely tough to implement. The messages are already sent; they'd have to create some database crawler that purged the data. Those kinds of things are extremely processor- and database-intensive. Which, of course, would affect the rest of the game that needs those resources.
--NT
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I'd settle for the "email" to just not turn red when you get a new email. Let the emails fester in there for an eternity for all I care, but no more red "email", please!
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