Classifying email senders on their email program

Finger printing senders by their mail user agent

[lammert]

I receive many emails, often from people I've never heard of before. I often look in the email headers to get an impression of the person behind the emails. Based on User Agent, I have made the following classes of senders:

Mutt
My favorite, must be an academic user. Most emails are serious. I almost always answer emails from people who use this mail program.

Outlook
Good second. The user paid for an email program (at least I think so). Many times from a larger company. Many mails are answered by me.

Thunderbird / Eudora
Often a nerd type with internet knowledge which didn't choose one of the default programs. Information in the emails is often interesting. Reasonable answer rate by me.

Outlook Express
Poor you. You couldn't find anything else than this free Microsoft program? My mother uses it, but that's no reason you should use it! Emails from people with this email program are almost never answered by me.

Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail
These users can better use their time for other things than mailing me. Almost all emails from these accounts end in my waste basket.

Did I miss anything?

[DamonHD]

Hmm

I'm often labelled "uber-geek" but I use Outlook Express, because other than a recent and very irritating habit of deadlocking, it is surprisingly good with (a) multiple accounts (b) signed/encrypted emails (c) direct HotMail access bypassing the Web front end.

Rgds

Damon

[encyclo]

I use KDE Kmail (Kontact) for personal emails or Novell Groupwise when at my day job. Would you speak to me? ;)

Outlook users are business users, but it is the company that pays, and they are probably mostly Outlook Express users at home.

Also, what about Pine? I used to use that a lot in the past.

I tend to classify users between HTML-email senders and plain-text email senders, the latter receiving more attention. :)

[jessejump]

You don't focus on the content of the mails?

[Lilliabeth]

I can't tell anything about a person by the email header.

I can sometimes learn a surprising amount about a person by reading something he wrote, though.

[encyclo]

I can sometimes learn a surprising amount about a person by reading something he wrote, though.

Now you're bringing logic into a foo thread, that's not fair! ;)

[rocknbil]

Outlook Express
Poor you. You couldn't find anything else than this free Microsoft program?

Many people on the 'net are not interested in knowing what they are doing, they are only interesting in doing business. If O.E. just happens to be there, they figure out how to use it, and it works for them, why would they ever bother looking for something else? Simply because some highbrow net-snob tells them it's making them look like an idiot?

Thunderbird / Eudora
Often a nerd type with internet knowledge which didn't choose one of the default programs.

Yup, I guess this is me, but not for the reasons you state here. Eudora was one of the first Windows-based email programs I encountered, it's always worked, and has rarely been vulnerable to viruses, so simply put, I've never had a reason to change. The full version is all I'll ever need.

You don't focus on the content of the mails?

I think this hits it perfectly. Please don't be offended, but placing a value on someone's communication based on their email client is simply rediculous. It's the same thing as putting this on your home page:

"This site is designed for best viewing in FireFox, if you're still using Internet Explorer, you don't know what you're missing. Download FireFox now!"

If you understand what's wrong with this announcement, you'll understand what's wrong with making such asumptions based on a mail client. :-(

And you did miss a few rather popular choices, mostly amongst us net-geeks, but sometimes a non-net savvy person will stumble across them, or a good computer admin will install it for them.

Linux:

Balsa
GNUMail
KMail
Pine

Windows:

Opera (yes it has a powerful mail client)
Pegasus
IncrediMail
Foxmail
Scribe/Inscribe
Courier
WordPerfect Mail (Yes, if soemone discovers this first and it works, why change?)
PocoMail
(There are many more . . .)

Macintosh - In addition to most of the windows-based ones above for which there are Mac equivalents. Do you also delete these without consideration? :-)

Mac OS X Mail
GyazMail
Magellan/Magellan Pro
Musashi
Pine (Which has survived the Linux platform VERY WELL under Mac OS)
PowerMail
Wanderlust

And what about web-based mail, which can be accessed from any computer, any time (Whoops let me get back to the office and check that, I only have my uber-cool laptop with me and that email is on the office computer, sorry . . . )

iMail
mail2web
Molly Mail
PandaMail
Pop3Now
XS2Mail

I hope this helps broaden your horizons a little, some of those assumptions you're making could be very valuable clients! :-)

[lammert]

You don't focus on the content of the mails?

Yes I do ;)

The emails I'm talking about are not comming to commercial websites, but content sites with information. People can't buy anything, the main purpose they are there is reading. When they write an email, it is in 95% percent of the cases because they didn't understand the content, nor the purpose of the sites.

For commercial sites, I just focus on the content and reply appropriately :)

[zCat]

There are three kinds of email program users:

Mere users who use some kind of GUI or interactive character-based program such as those mentioned above;

Pseudo-geeks who think they're cool because they use the Unix command-line program

mail

;

true geeks who use

telnet

to communicate directly at protocol level with the receiving mail server and know the SMTP commands by heart.

[DamonHD]

Hi zCat,

When I needed to get a complaint through to the CEO of a large corporation recently, the only way to locate his email address (even which of their domains would really accept mail at all) was to directly telnet to their mail servers... And this was after all the normal Googling, manual inspection of MX records, etc, etc... B^>

And all to get a refund on some groceries they failed to deliver!

Still, he's proved to be a very helpful chap, and we got our refund.

Rgds

Damon

PS. After contact was established I used Outlook Express as usual!

PPS. Which "mail"; /usr/ucb/mail, /usr/bin/mail (mailx) or some other Johnny-come-lately-mail? B^>

[edited by: DamonHD at 10:42 am (utc) on Aug. 6, 2006]

[zCat]

Hi DamonHD

When I needed to get a complaint through to the CEO of a large corporation recently, the only way to locate his email address (even which of their domains would really accept mail at all) was to directly telnet to their mail servers... And this was after all the normal Googling, manual inspection of MX records, etc, etc... B^>

Interesting... must note as potential useful trick. In a previous working life I had the misfortune to deal with mailing lists, and spent more time than I'd have liked talking directly with recalcitrant mail servers.

PPS. Which "mail"; /usr/ucb/mail, /usr/bin/mail (mailx) or some other Johnny-come-lately-mail

zcat@vax:~> ls -lsd /usr/ucb/mail
0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 1979-08-22 14:17 /usr/ucb/mail -> the_1970s_called_and_want_their_mailclient_back

Well, when I'm not using an electron microscope to insert my mail messages directly into the Ethernet, I will admit to using

/usr/bin/[b]n[/b]ail

though.

[DamonHD]

Hi lammert,

How would you classify one of zCat's electron-microscope-inserted (easy, easy, EASY! now tiger) messages?

Rgds

Damon

[lammert]

How can I identify those electron microscope messages? I guess they have no header at all? In that case my spam filter will filter them before I will ever see them. I have quite an amount of small emails in my spambox these days. Maybe zCat is trying to contact me? :)

/usr/bin/nail is too sophisticated. It's an enhanced version of mailx, which has already to many featured for me to understand. I stay with /bin/mail.

I send all my messages with echo "My message" ¦ mail -s "Subject"
I read my mails with cat /var/mail/username/message
and sort all my messages with grep X-Mailer /var/mail/username/* ¦ sort

Now you understand why the information in the email header is so important for me :)

[mcavic]

I use Outlook 2000 because it's the most friendly for me. My mom uses Eudora, because she can have several instances of it installed, and use each one for a different account. This is the easiest way to do multiple accounts that I've seen. But, Eudora's way of saving all attachments into a single folder instead of keeping them with the message is really stupid, and increases virus risks, because you end up with a folder full of files of unknown origin.

Also, there's really nothing wrong with using Yahoo or Gmail for someone who travels or uses different computers.