I gather no information on site visitors or email correspondents, even including those who buy something. Most of the 100 or so emails that arrive at this site daily are deleted during the evening mail check. The several email messages concerning patent searches, cd-rom orders, or catalog item reservations are held in the "new mail" folder until the business is completed, and then deleted. No email addresses are retained beyond this except for those of personal acquaintances.

Purchasers of a cd-rom title may elect to enter an email address on the order form for notification of possible cd revisions. This list is maintained on an Access database and will never be used for soliciting sales of other cd's or products. I do absolutely no multiple mailings.

2. NO COOKIES

No cookies are set from this site. While cookies can serve a useful purpose, such as enabling shopping carts and automated log-ons, many sites have overdone their use in ways that are of no value to the viewer.

3. PAYPAL

Most American Artifacts customers are quite familiar with Paypal and readily use it. However, others who are ordering swallow nest cups or nest box cameras often have no experience with the process. My reason for using Paypal rather than direct credit card ordering on a secure site is to avoid having customers' credit card information at my home. Our business is in a barn and an old farmhouse with zero security. Anyone could walk up the lane and help themselves to computers and paper records any day or night. And our paper all goes to the local recycling center intact. I think many people would be uneasy knowing their credit card information might be handled in this manner. Paypal is perfectly safe and as easy to use as any direct online ordering site. I receive immediate notification of your purchase and I never have your credit card information to worry about. And, life can go on as usual here, without locking doors or shredding paper.

Email to American Artifacts

Subject matter
American Artifacts business mail is answered immediately (subscriptions, cd-rom orders, patent search requests, catalog item reservations). Other email generally related to one of the subjects on this website is answered as time allows. From past experience of vast amounts of email piling up in the new mail folder, I try to process all the day's mail each night, but limit the time spent to one hour. Topics that are best directed elsewhere are appraisal requests for antiques, how to get rid of barn swallows, and how to feed baby birds found in the yard. These three topics comprise 90 percent of my email during the nesting season. I greatly enjoy all the other email on all subjects from barn owls to treadle lathes and try to promptly answer all of it.

Email attachments
Text-only emails are read first and are greatly appreciated. The poor quality of our rural phone lines seems to limit our connection speed to around 26,000 or slower, making messages with large attachments download very slowly. Also, I use a simple mail program rather than a web browser to read the mail, so messages sent with web formatting can be quite difficult to read - instead of a paragraph of text, such messages are displayed as 2 pages of gibberish (html tags). Most of the web formatted email messages I receive are spams with hot links to advertiser's sites, so such messages are more likely to be deleted without being read, if the subject line suggests a spam.

2/3/2004 update This week the American Artifacts site received over 1000 copies of the current email worm. It has been very difficult to connect to my mail site to download new mail and, possibly, some email has bounced back to senders. Like the previous virus attack last August, this one is just over 30k. At least temporarily, the maximum file size that my mail program will download from the server has been set to 30k.

Another new trend in spamming is making the message very small - often under 1k, and using very tricky subject lines or none at all. Today I received 12 spams with the subject line "Hi". Please use a keyword in the subject line that will relate to this site or your subject. For example any words like "lathe, sparrow, nest cam, microscope" all would be opened, however, "help needed", "a question", "read this" "urgent assistance needed" all would be deleted, since they are frequently used by spammers.

Anonymous email
Several emails arrive each day with no human name attached to them, either in the "from" field or in the body of the letter. I realize that people may have reasons for not revealing their name or that sometimes they simply neglect to do so, but, all anonymous mail not related to my business is instantly deleted, on the assumption that it did not originate from a human. And, I would feel rather foolish beginning a response "Dear jujubean@aol.com".