On Fri, May 18, 2007 at 12:36:50AM -0600, Kyle Wheeler wrote: > Mmm, I guess it all rests on the specific definition of "people I care > about receiving mail from", and in your case, it requires that people > find a way to contact you in non-private-email (or non-email) form > first, to request the secret address. It doesn't though. Right in my sig is all the information you need to find a way to send me a private e-mail. And it will take you all of about 5 seconds, if you have any idea how to use a web search engine. [admittedly, the first address you find no longer works, due to it getting spammed to death, but the second one you'll find does work.] > Frankly, I don't see much difference between your current method, and > maintaining a simple whitelist where anyone whose email address isn't > in your whitelist cannot contact you (let's say, email from senders > not in the whitelist get rejected). In fact, if you were to use a > whitelist, that would even allow you to revoke permission to send to > you. There's a huge difference... you just haven't thought enough about the problem. Two weeks ago, a buddy of mine sent me an invitation to go hiking. He sent it from an address I'd had no previous knowledge of. Using your technique, one of two conditions would occur: 1. his mail would be filtered, because his new address is not whitelisted 2. I would be required to filter all non-whitelisted e-mail for review, which I don't have time for. I probably would have deleted it without ever noticing it along with the the sea of spam I'd have to pour over to find it. Unacceptable. Using my method, I saw his mail immediately, and added a rule to sort it appropriately. No problem. > > I've also already stated that I maintain a public address that gets > > heavily filtered. > > Given how you've criticized such filtering as potentially losing mail, > I don't see that this is a valid way to address the problem of "people > on mailing-list X wish to contact you". What you're missing is, I DON'T WANT THEM TO CONTACT ME. I see no reason why anyone on a mailing list can't say what they want to say on list. Don't want to post to the list? No problem... don't send mail. Or, take five seconds and look me up. The public address is one that is not used by people I know, and if I miss mail there, I really don't care. Personal mail that I actually want is what I'm concerned about, and those addresses are not filtered, whatsoever (except for sorting purposes). > And, if this address is your solution to the problem of people you > don't know contacting you, why don't you put that address in your > sig? Because I want to discourage its use. I don't want private mail from you. But it's there, if you really think you need to send me some. > Posting your IM screen name so that you can send each other your > respective email addresses is roughly the same as posting your phone > number to mailing list for the same purpose. Not at all. My MSN ID is kraiteredman. To IM me, you'll need my approval. Which I won't give, unless I can identify you from your screen name. And maybe not then. ;-) If I deny your request, you can never bother me again. It's actually really great. > > irc private message, > > Which is equivalent to IM, only it requires a slightly older and less > popular communication protocol. Not at all. Private IRC messages are not logged, no one can see them except the sender and recipient. There is no possibility of having the address culled from such a message. C'mon man, you're a bright guy, and this is not brain surgery. Sure, I suppose someone could write an IRC bot to ask for and collect addresses, but I would obviously have the sense not to reply to unsolicited requests for my address. > And my point is that they boil down to either providing some permanent > email-alternative (which can then be potentially exploited by spammers > of some variety) or a temporary mechanism (url, email, what-have-you) > which requires significantly more effort. And your point is mistaken. -- 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 due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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