Bye-Bye Bozo!

"Every day, hundreds of people are using e-mail for the first time. It's wonderful to have your friendsonline, but unfortunately, there are a lot of bumbling new users and obnoxious Net weirdos who'll obtain your e-mail address and start to bug you. We've developed a few surefire methods to get rid of these time-wasters and keep them from clogging up your mail box."

Ad from PC Magazine, Nov. 21, 1995

We may take email filters and spam traps for granted now, but Eudora is specifically mentioned as "an intelligent e-mail system" that includes filters to auto-delete messages from certain users, akin to a Kill File, Twit List or Bozo Bin for USENET. WIRED also mentions The WELL's Bozo Filter in a 1993 (digitized?) article, and the bozo filter lives on, at least in the Free Dictionary.

If filters don't work, or aren't hands-on enough, Mark Frauenfelder suggests replying to chain emails with mutated copies. In case you missed this period of the internet, this was a thing in the 1990s, and have returned in 2020 as a way to share recipes and spread uplifting news (though not everyone welcomes these), instead of reviving chain letters with offers of wealth and threats of death from the early digital age.

And a suggestion for the clingy i-buddy who won't take your lack of reply as a subtle hint to bug off, Mark suggests sending a "mail-bomb" with something dull you find online, "like a deadly dull 100-page government policy document about railroad land use," as a way of distracting someone. This was also the time before increasingly large (online) email storage, when a 20mb attachment could also be considered a "mail bomb" in that it would fill your inbox and prevent you from receiving or sending any other emails.

Eudora was retired in 2006, replaced by Thunderbird, a collaboration between Qualcomm and Mozilla. In 2019, the number of global e-mail users amounted to 3.9 billion, which is a good chunk of the 7.7 billion people on earth that year. Gmail is globally the predominant email provider, with a few other major providers vying for a cut of that (broadly ad-sponsored, free to end user) market, which is primarily web-based. Desktop (or laptop) clients are still common for business users, but often paired with web clients. Automatic spam filtering is a given, and Gmail sorts emails into categories by default.

Most people treat this as a positive thing, simplifying their lives and decisions, but important emails can get automagically tossed into a bozo bin, such as political emails. If you want more control over your email, you'll have to pay for it. But it's still free-free to send mutant replies and policy documents.