On a good day I get some 100 e-mails on a bad days there are many more. Many of these e-mails are spam. The e-mail software I use has an inbuild spam filter, it must be trained and it more than halves the work that I need to do. For the other stuff, I have to look at the mail to decide its relevancy. When it is from a bank or monetary institution I do not do business with it is spam, when it is from China in Chinese it is spam. As I am Dutch many of the American names that send me stuff are suspect. Typicaly this works out fine.
When I want to connect to people who are "official" or high up in an organisation, there is little chance for me to actually reach the right level. There are often many intermediary levels before my message gets to Mr or Mrs Right. These intermediary levels have similar strategies like mine; I do not expect that they are impressed with my myrealbox.com or gmail.com e-mail adressses. It makes me just a person of the public (and I am) not someone who asks something on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation. So it would be helpfull if people who are known to be active on behalf of the WMF to have a wikimedia.org e-mail adress. It helps to overcome the barriers thrown up by the intermediary levels and get a job done, a message delivered.
Thanks,
GerardM
1 comment:
Actually this is very true - a problem I have as well with a very special mail destination. If I use my yahoo account or any other of the freemails it is easy that people think I am spamming and if I use my own domain name many think I am trying to sell translations ... so the real message that is about Open Content, Open Source, contribution, communication, understanding each other is not considered as such. I am sure that my requests at least in two cases where I contacted authorities/institutions (oenology and regligion as glossary themes) are blocked by the secretary (if I were the secretary I would do this as well). So having an e-mail address that states who we are writing for would be simply great. I hope sooner or later (better sooner ;-) this will be possible.
Ciao, Sabine
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