On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 06:09:20PM +0200, René Clerc wrote: > * Thomas Roessler <roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [15-05-2007 17:25]: > > On 2007-05-15 10:29:19 -0400, Derek Martin wrote: > > > This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it > > > will result in undeliverable mail. Sorry for the inconvenience. > > > Thank the spammers. > > > > Am I the only one who finds this offensive? > > Why is that? Indeed, why? A few facts: 1. At one point my mail server was receiving more than 1000 spam messages per day to my various personal accounts. 2. The single largest (though indirect) source of that spam was mailing list traffic. The vast majority of the spam in question was sent to addresses I used on public mailing lists. The addresses in question were only ever used for mailing list posts, so the method of harvesting those addresses is not in question: they were culled from the mailing list posts. It is the only possibility. 3. I do not believe in spam filters; they require that I assume risk (however small it may be with modern filtering software) that a legitimate personal mail might be sent to the abyss. The risk can be mitigated only by saving questionable messages into a folder for review, which I would be forced to spend time reviewing, which I don't want to do. And even then, there is still some degree of risk that I'll miss an important personal message. No matter how good filtering software has gotten, there is always at least some risk of this. 4. Since adopting my new method of spam management (now some 5+ years old, if I'm not mistaken), I receive at most a total of about *3 spams per day* to all my personal e-mail addresses combined, *completely unfiltered* for spam. My methods are unorthadox, and you certainly are not required to like them (though the source of your offense is confounding to me), but THEY WORK. They have proven to be immensely effective beyond my wildest imaginations when I concocted this spam management scheme. They in fact work substantially better than previous attempts I've made to set up spam filtering software such that I wouldn't miss messages and still spend nearly no time whatsoever reviewing spam; and I'm guaranteed not to miss a mail due to filtering. So you'll be hard-pressed to convince me to stop posting to mailing lists from an invalid address. What would it take? Someone needs to write an anonymizing mailing list management software package which NEVER includes anything that matches a legal e-mail address--perhaps unless it is specially quoted to allow it to be posted--but allows subscribed users to either reply privately or to the list by keeping track of who sent what messages, and acting as an anonymizing proxy. Alternately, the list management software would have to compare any e-mail regex matches to its data store of subscribed users, and sanitize any matches. THEN, you'd need to convince the list admins of all the mailing lists I care about to start using that software. Do that, and I'll stop posting from a bogus address. I'd likely do it myself except that I already have an extremely effective solution, the maintenance of which involves virtually zero effort on my part, whereas the above solution would require rather extensive effort. If you really want to get my personal address, it's not that hard to obtain, actually... There are a few reasonably obvious ways, including asking me for it on-list. Though if I don't recognize the poster, or otherwise think I'd be better off not trusting my inbox to the requester, I may decline to provide it... There are other reasonably obvious ways, which I won't detail, but will only say that I am aware of them and they are intentional. Also, I do regrettably maintain a "public" address out of necessity on account of my participation in various OSS projects and certain mailing lists where it is difficult or undesireable to remain anonymous (from a contact perspective), which *is* heavily filtered -- but I don't particularly care if I miss mail sent there, since people I care about know how to contact me reliably. While I haven't tried it recently, I've no doubt that this address can easily be obtained by merely sticking my name in google and looking through a couple of entries that come up. I doubt you'll even need to click on the links... just look at the search results, and it'll probably be in one of them. BTW, troll? ...particularly since I've posted about my reasons for doing this on this list IN GREAT DETAIL in the past (feel free to search the archives), and particularly because after all these years, you know my posting habits quite well, and I'm certain you know the sort of response I'm likely to give, for better or worse (though I do honestly always hope that at least someone benefits from every message I post, in one way or another, and wouldn't bother to post if I didn't think someone could). -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank the spammers.
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