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Re: message dates



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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