Slorp

Don't forget the inevitable "3 months ago we were made aware of a breach of the BONTO! servers. What information was taken? Bet you'd like to know wouldn't you. What have we done about this situation? Fuck you, that's what."

BUT . . .But. To make it up to you we’ve also sold your info to a “Privacy Lock” company who will sell you something imaginary for as long as you pay them. That’ll totally fix it.
- 3 months later; privacy lock company is breached
23 and Me customer here, and I couldn't relate more. When I reached out to support to ask what data was stolen and how much they were planning on compensating me for having my genome leaked to the web, their answer was basically "We have no idea what you're talking about. lol fuck you"
You can't use this service unless you give us your social security number. Whoops! Your SSN was stolen three months ago and we just found out.

Don’t forget the 4500 emails suggesting you upgrade to slorp pro-premium-plus-max

You make fun of this but I really had bonto pro-premium-plus-max and it comes with many benefits like not getting these mails anymore
Then when you finally upgrade to premium plus max lifetime, the acquisition happens and lifetime licenses get cancelled.
"You have 17 messages in your Slorp-box! Click here to log in"
- "Loser McDouchebag from high school recently Slorped! Click here to read it!"
And if you already did, then you're really missing out on the pro lifetime plan that includes a lifetime license!*
^(* lifetime license only valid until we release the next version in 2 months)

*Your 2FA login code for SLORP

*Your password reset link for SLORP

*You have (2) new messages from other SLORP users

*There has been a login attempt from a new device on SLORP

*Your SLORP password may have been compromised

I always get 4 fucking emails when I login into firefox on a new device
SLORP is best enjoyed in the app!
ALERT: You have a SLORP update!
SLORP with the Plasticians! New slorpson next week!
Must SLORP slorps this week!

Click here to unsubscribe from Slorp marketing emails. First log in. Forgot password? Click here to reset. Hmm, doesn't appear to be a user account with that email address. Create an account? Check your email for the activation link. Confirm your contact information. Consent to tracking cookies? Manage notifications. Unsubscribe from all? We're sad to see you go!

You could just do the “report spam” if the unsubscribe link doesn’t immediately work.
- Yeah, the CAN-SPAM act, as far as I understand it, doesn't allow them to force you to make an account just to unsubscribe.
I always report spam without unsubscribing. It fks up their score with google.
- That, and there's a high likelyhood the only thing the unsubscribe button would do is giving the spammers the valuable information that this email address is actually in use.
- Every platform with enough technical resources should support one click unsubscribe.
  I never understood the concept of making it difficult to unsubscribe. Marketers have a hard enough time getting users to open email at all. Let users help you clean up your subscriber list with an easy opt out to reduce your send cost and improve deliverability.
/> reset password
"hmm, there doesn't appear to be a user account with that email address"
/> Makes new account
"User account with that email exists. Reset password?"
- Try password
  Incorrect credentials
  Reset password
  Fill in the password you want
  Password can't be the same as previous password
  (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Slorp? That's a weird way to spell Twitch.

Remember when email was useful? I remember when it was magical!

Time for a story from the ancient times. I had this idea and asked my professor for advice. He said he knew a person on the other side of the world who would know all about it. “This is his ‘email’ address.”

I had never heard about ‘email’ so I needed to learn what it was and how to send one. I wrote my message and off it went. The very next morning I had a reply. One of the best experts on a topic I was keen about had shared their thoughts from the other side of the world, just like that.

In that time, a long time ago as you’ll appreciate, that interaction was magical.

In an instant I understood the power of the Usenet. A while later and with a couple of additional protocols they started calling that the Internet.

Usenet is now INTERNET!
- ...
  ...
  The INTERNET is shutting down (?)
- The Usenet actually still exists.
I remember in like 1997 or so, my friend's dad got VoIP working on his computer, and we would talk to random people from around the world. I still have fond memories of my first conversation. It was someone in Australia! All the way on the other side of the planet, and we were talking in real time, FOR FREE! I've been a computer nerd ever since.
- I had a similar but very different experience. At the beginning of COVID my buddy and I got our ham radio licenses.
  One of my earliest contacts was a guy in Japan, over 6000 miles away! Nothing between us but some wire strung up in a tree, and a couple of radios. Using the ionosphere to bounce our signals around the world.
  So. Stinking. Awesome.
  I've been hooked ever since.
  It's funny because it's almost the opposite of your story, you were using the amazing new technology and infrastructure to make the trip. These days we take that very infrastructure for granted.
  It's fun to try doing it with as little infrastructure as possible!
Heh, that's nostalgia. I always wonder what the young people of today's equivalent will be. Probably something quantum.
- There is no equivalent, because it's not new, and even if it was, it's monetized and manipulative. The internet back then was wide open, free as fuck, and completely new!
- The pre-Google YouTube is probably the closest thing I can think of. And just a time before when everything about the Internet was about profit.
  Back when Google were cool.
- It’s happening right now with AI. It’s currently in the Usenet phase. A few people understand it and are using it to positively alter their daily lives by improving their ability to gather and filter information, but (ironically) thanks to the internet the vast majority of people are distracted by some niches like generative art or writing book reports. In the next year or two, we’ll start to see mainstream people have AI personal assistants that will have conversations with other AIs. Even without the robotics component, daily life will change. Remember before you could order Amazon same day delivery, or Door Dash a meal? Imagine that level (and better) of tracking and communication for every service you could need, all completely automated. Your sink broke? A perfectly fine plumber can be here in 20 mins, be advised to expect an 80% chance that you’ll see their buttcrack, a 40% chance that they aren’t wearing deodorant, and a 100% chance there will be multiple off-color remarks about the current political situation. Does this bother you? Your AI already knows and an instant deep dive of reviews and social media has found a plumber that may in fact be your soul mate. They’ll be here on Thursday. Your AI queued up a playlist of your mutual favorite songs.
  In a slower but possibly as life altering revolution, AR. Apple is starting this with Apple Vision Pro, but this will need to be miniaturized down to a discrete pair of glasses (like Meta Ray-Bans) with 3 pieces of tech that aren’t there yet:
  Even smaller computers (remember when they were the size of shipping containers?)
  More efficient batteries
  A display technology that both adjusts focus depending on the distance your eyes are focusing at while also occluding reality.
  I’m confident these will exist in our lifetime, but probably not within the next decade. Once they all come together, the way people experience life will change. Both for the better and worse. If capitalism hasn’t been legislatively reigned in a bit, the ads are going to be insane.
Yeah, man. Good times. Good times.
That is what the internet used to be. You could reach out to some of the best minds in science and industry. Then they opened it up to the public. And by “public” I mean every degenerate opportunist in the world.

Every goddamn time...

☐ I would like to be contacted for marketing purposes

Next day...

Here's that marketing email you requested!

Business contaminates everything useful with endless appeals to your attention.

You forgot the part where BONTO leaks user information, and now you get a torrent of spam...

"Thank you for your pre-paid lifetime subscription to Slorp! Unfortunately, after the acquisition by BONTO!, we have made the difficult decision not to honor these Slorp Platinum accounts going forward. But please enjoy a 15% discount on your first month of BONTO! Premium+! (Have you seen our stock price?)"

(Have you seen our class action?)

I'd argue that email is as useful as regular mail. I get about 2 letters a year written by a person. The rest is bills and marketing.

Email is basically a central notification hub for users, and I'd much prefer that than having to log into each specific app to be notified of things.

Love these anti-features
- Linkedin also send you emails even if you repeatedly turn them off
- Click. Report spam. Just as it deserves.

signs into portal

ding!

"New sign-on to Grek Ultra Product Manager Plus!"

Why is this the default

"Security alert: Login from a new unknown device!" - it's the same computer on the same network as the previous 300 logins!
- How dare you use a browser that doesn't let us track the fuck out of you! Delete cookies and cache every time!?
  You deserve this.
- ie. Fuck you for deleting our cookies

THats not true, its also a bunch of

"HOT DEAILS ON (item you just talked to a friend about half an hour ago that they somehow magically know about in ways that should terrify every fucking person within 500 feet of a digital device) AT HOTDEALS426424346423.COM.CO.EU.RU/HOTDEALS/TOTALLYNOTASCAM/SUCKERSCLICKTHIS/HOTDEAL4U.COM"

edit

I did not intend that to resolve to a clickable link, lol.

Love that Firefox highlights this cursed domain name
Oh don't worry, testing if a string is a valid URL is easy, just use the following easy to remember regular expression:
- \x{20000}-\x{2FFFD}\x{30000}-\x{3FFFD}\x{40000}-\x{4FFFD}
  It seems like all that unicode shenanigans could be simplified with the proper character class.
- Regex are love; regex are life.
www.creedthoughts.gov.www\creedthoughts

I remember when Slorp was Qooble.

Man I miss good old Qooble.
- Qooble took a shit after it bought up Aoyel

Slorp has detected that you haven't opened our emails for a long time. It's very important to slorp that you keep your contact information updated. Please login Here to verify your slorp account details.

-- the fact slorp gets upset that I have tracking pixels disabled so they can't monitor my email usage is one big reason they can go slorp themselves

Hold up, tracking pixels? What the fuck is that and how do I disable it.
- make sure your email client has loading external images disabled.
- When you load an image from a remote server it leaves an item in their activity logs (when you download the image, the IP address, your email client’s user agent, and a few other details).
  If you make the URLs for the images unique, you can now attach an email send to a specific person reading that email, and you can see where and when they read it.
  It’s been a security risk for a long long long time and only recently have email clients started dealing with it. Some will download the images remotely or proxy them for you, but I recommend disabling remote images in emails altogether.

I have a 100 gb Google storage just so I don’t run out of email space. Even if you aggressively unsubscribe from shit, there’s just waaaaay too much emailing in general by companies.

I once bought four items in a single order from Amazon. They shipped all items separately, which meant I got four shipment mails, four DHL ‘it’s underway’ messages, four ‘it’s being delivered today’ messages and four ‘your item has been delivered’ messages by DHL. Oh and to round it out: four delivery confirmations from Amazon.

All told, that one four-item order meant 21 separate emails. There HAS to be a more efficient way to handle that.

I considered buying some space from Google since their "never run out of space" thing is long gone from the beta I signed up for.
But then I just nuked my whole storage. Damn that was nice.
Throw that heap out. It's not healthy.
- Well it’s not like the entire 100 gb is email; there’s also actual things stored there.
  I also get and send a LOT of larger, work related emails. And I need to keep old stuff for reference. It just wouldn’t work with the basic 15 gb; I’d need to clean it out every three months or so. With the 100, I just chuck out a bunch of stuff every two years or so.
Even with snail mail, I'll routinely get the same two letters delivered to the same address on the same day - one for me and one for my wife.
Just the laziest printing/mailing imaginable even after this being junk mail, but nobody seems to care.

It seems like it's been a while since you last checked in with BONTO! We'd love your feedback on how we can improve. Log in to get started!

Elaborate?
- With Gmail you can add a plus to the end of your email address followed by a label I.E. example+label@gmail.com. This works the same as your regular email but you can use the plus label to filter or automatically delete mails. It's also useful when you don't trust a company to add the company name after the plus to see of they sell your email to third parties.
- If you give your email as you+amazon@email.com then it will still receive it at you@email.com but now you know who sold it if you start getting spam sent to it.
I only wish it could be applied retroactively

TBH I think if your email is filled with garbage you need to do a better job of managing your email.

If they think email is bad now, then obviously a lot of people dont remember the 90s before spam filtering got decent.

At least then it was only Bill Gates personally sending me chain letters
- And that Prince dude in Nigeria. He was chill.
- He never did get around to sending me that Windows 98 license. Ended up having to use a keygen.
- I was so excited about the thousands of dollars I was going to get in the mail when a friend and I came up with the brilliant idea of sending that one back and forth to each other.
  I was going to get so many Pokémon cards.

I miss Slorp. All the modern copies of Slorp suck.

Yeah. Nü Meowmeow Beans was a disaster.
- Is this a Community reference? Fantastic.
average BONTO! enjoyer here, go slorp yourself.

CEO is my cat. He got some teeth pulled. Slorp slorp...

Glorp! Glorp!

Wait…. It’s Custard, not Carl

Folks, we need to learn to use aliases.

Fastmail has quite nice implementation of this, they call it "masked e-mail", but I bet there are many (perhaps under other names). (Disclaimer: I have no connection to FastMail other than I use their service and like it.)

I've learned to just create new masked email for every domain where i share e-mail -- legit or not. Then you can just disable the alias if it gets annoying. You can also reply to an e-mail you got to the alias without revealing your real address (as long as you do it from FastMail UI).

10 minute mail solves most of this.

For those sites which accept it. Sadly, Slorp was not one of those.
- Back when I used to run my own mail server on my own domain, I'd sign up with emails with a username that matched the service I was signing up for, like slorp @ domain. A handful of services would be like "hey we canceled your account because you're using our slorp trademark and impersonating us," which would usually be mildly amusing.

I used to unironically enjoy skimming my spam folder for fun scams, but nowadays there are no fun scams, it’s all fake amazon gift cards, fake pharmacies, and fake iCloud and Cash App emails.

I miss the days where it felt like a sexy single was interested in me, purely by my email, or I had been singled out by royalty of some sort.