Re: OT: offending sig + headers
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On Thursday, May 17 at 05:18 PM, quoth Derek Martin:
>> The reason I bring it up is that it's a spam fighting technique
>> that doesn't make suspected spam disappear, but disallows delivery.
>> So a false positive means someone gets a bounce, which alerts them
>> to the problem.
>
> Which is highly annoying for people who legitimately want to send you
> mail, but aren't already whitelisted. I personally hate it, and
> refuse to subject people I know to such irritation.
Now, I don't have a particularly strong opinion on either of these
methods (though I acknowledge both their strengths and weaknesses)...
but isn't this the pot calling the kettle black here?
I mean, you have two potential sources of irritation for "people who
legitimately want to send you mail" (however you wish to define
"legitimately"):
1. A challenge message demanding proof that you're not a spammer
2. A refusal to give you a valid email address, and a glib retort
to thank the spammers
And one of these is supposed to be less irritating than the other?
Logically, the only difference between taking the extra step of adding
someone to a whitelist and taking the extra step of providing someone
with your "valid" email address is that the former requires only the
receiver's effort (if the receiver is lazy, the sender can still
kvetch about it) and the latter requires effort from both sender and
receiver (if the receiver is lazy, no mail gets sent).
It suddenly occurs to me; if two people who both use Derek's anti-spam
measure are subscribed to a public mailing list, and one wishes to
contact the other, how can they do it? Person A posts a message on the
list saying "hey, I'd like to contact person B off-list" and person B
replies "I'd like to tell you what my email address is, but I don't
want to post it to a public mailing list, and your address appears to
be invalid..." (translation: "you first"). Obviously they'll need to
post something to the list that will allow them to contact each other
- ---a phone number, a temporary URL, *something*. Any method they
choose, though, will expose them to spammers (or telemarketers; same
thing, different medium). So, either they merely shunt the problem to
another medium (i.e. posting a phone number), or they are forced to
expose themselves to spammers (at least briefly), and meanwhile they
fill the list with debating how to get in touch.
It seems to me that the success of Derek's technique relies at least
in part on the fact that nobody else uses it. Not that that's a bad
thing! Hey, if it works for you, cool.
~Kyle
- --
Science is what we can tell a computer. Art is everything else.
-- Knuth
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