Mailbox
This week in Mailbox: Listeners' response to Radio Prague's coverage of the tsunami disaster in South Asia, what to do if an email sent to Radio Prague bounces back, Radio Prague's January competition question. Listeners quoted: T. Jaisakthivel, Rabi Sankar Bosu and K. Thiagarajan, all from India.
Three weeks on after the dreadful tsunami disaster in South Asia, the plight of survivors is still making headlines worldwide. People from all over the globe keep writing in to Radio Prague, responding to our coverage of the tragedy from a Czech perspective - and also offering their condolences to the bereaved.
Mr T. Jaisakthivel from India wrote:
Also from India, we got this email from Mr. Rabi Sankar Bosu, who lives in West Bengal.
"First of all, I would like to offer my deepest condolences to the tidal wave victims of our country India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia and the Maldives. The Tsunami on Boxing Day killed more people than [the atomic bomb] did at Hiroshima. The real culprit is nature. God forbid there should be another tsunami."
Mr Bosu also writes:
"I want to thank you all at Radio Prague's English Service for the excellent programmes which listeners have been able to enjoy during another nice broadcasting year. I do not make resolutions because I can't keep them. But I did make one resolution for 2005, which I promise to keep. I am going to devote more time to listening to my favourite shortwave station: Radio Prague, the English Service."
"I am used to sending my reception reports via email, since it is fast and gets me the QSL the earliest. Last week, when I tried to send the email, it unfortunately bounced back to me. I don't know the reason why it happened. If my address is blocked at your end, really it is regrettable. I do hope Radio Prague is happy to receive letters from listeners in various formats. I have been enjoying your English service for the past 24 years."
Since Mr Thiagarajan is not the only one who has complained about this situation in recent months, I talked to Vaclav Sigmund of Radio Prague's Internet Section, which also manages the email accounts of Radio Prague's six language services. I asked Vaclav to explain why it sometimes happens that some email messages bounce back.
"I must say that there are several reasons for this, that contribute to the fact that an email you send to us can be bounced. Your email may contain viruses in which case our mail server bounces it. The main reason for that is that your email comes from a mail server which is known to send email for anybody who asks. Due to this the so-called spammers, people who send commercial messages in bulk are using these servers to spread their unsolicited email, also known as spam.
"At present nine out of ten messages we get are spam. Because of this we have to filter all the messages we receive. As this filtering consumes a lot of computer power, it is almost impossible to filter all the mail we receive. So when it is known that the mail server from which the message comes is excessively used for sending unsolicited email messages, we have to block all messages from such a mail server, regardless of whether the email is spam or whether it is clean. If this happens to you, you can change the server you use to send your email messages or you can ask your internet service provider whether he has faced the described problems with spam recently."
Are there maybe any words that our listeners should avoid in their email that the filtering system can recognise as spam?
"There are almost none of these. This is not the case because there are different levels of recognising the email as spam, a technical level and a semantic level. The email has to fulfil all the tests before we mark it as spam. Probably, the problem the listener is asking about is that he really uses a server which is completely blocked to send email to us and in this case he really needs to ask his internet service provider to do something about it."
So as you heard, regrettably, ninety percent of all email that comes to Radio Prague is unsolicited mail. The filtering systems we are using may identify your email as spam if your Internet provider is known to let spammers use the server to send unsolicited bulk mail. Our Internet section keep fine-tuning the filters, but if it does happen that your message bounces, please try and send it from another email address, if you have the chance. We apologise for the inconvenience. Of course, we welcome all messages from you and we never block the addresses of our listeners. We just have to protect our computers from viruses and our staff from having to go through hundreds of spam messages every day.
I hope that this won't discourage anyone from sending us the answer to Radio Prague's January competition question, which is as follows:
"One of the mayors of the US city of Chicago was of Czech origin. Born in Kladno, near Prague, he left for the United States as a child. He started working at a young age as a coal miner and gradually worked his way up to become Chicago's mayor. In his third year of office, in 1933, he was wounded in an assassination attempt on President Roosevelt and died of his injuries weeks later. He is buried at the Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago. We'd like to know his name."
Send your answers to the usual address: Radio Prague, English Section, 12099, Prague 2 or email us at [email protected]
