On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 09:23:56AM -0800, Jason Helfman wrote:
> This is the one of the most humorous threads ever. Down right
> ridiculous, actually.
The OP wants to use SSH to send mail via a remote MTA. There are lots
of reasons why someone might want to do that... for example, the
machine they run mutt on can't talk on port 25 due to being filtered
by their ISP. There are potential security issues with setting this
up -- which we are discussing -- but I don't see anything ridiculous
about anything that's been said in this thread. The best decision is
an informed decision...
> If you don't want email, change your header to be from a email dump
> account. Just cause you can't manage your spam, don't blame everyone else.
> The Internet has become a money making entity, just like the good ole US of
> A. Get used to it.
Presumably, you are now talking about my use of an invalid address for
posting purposes, which has nothing at all to do with this thread.
I can manage my spam quite well, thank you, and this is how I do it.
I am careful about who gets my e-mail address, so that spammers have a
much harder time getting it in order to send me spam. I don't run
spamassassin or any other such software, because:
- they consume too many cycles
- they slow e-mail delivery down unnecessarily
- they don't do a better job than my very basic procmail rules
- I don't trust them not to lose legitimate mail, so I still need to
look over all my spam. As a result, I want as little of it to be
delivered to me as possible.
I do use some simple procmail rules for whitelisting known addresses
and mailing lists, and sorting those messages into folders; I filter
everything else into a spam folder.
I've been managing spam this way for 4 years, and while the amount of
spam I receive has ballooned up a bit in the last year or so (mostly the
result of malicious people who obtained my e-mail address and posted it
on mailing lists like this one, to "make a point"), I STILL receive
less than 20 spams a day. During that last 4 years, I have found only
a handful (less than 10 total) of legitimate messages in my spam
folder, mostly from friends who changed their e-mail address or sent
mail from an alternate account that I didn't know about. Finding
those messages in a folder with 20 messages in it is fairly easy,
especially since I have mutt color the index for all mails matching my
friends' and family members' names.
By contrast, at work I have very little control over how I interact
with spam, as I am forced to submit to my company's spam filtering
software. Messages which it decides are spam are marked as such with
a header, and filtered into a spam folder. I recieve about 200-500
spams a day, and I have to look through them to make sure nothing
important got mis-filtered. Several times a week, I find such
messages. If I simply deleted all of those messages without looking
at them, important mail would be lost. That is unacceptable, no
matter how annoying and time-consuming looking over 500 spams may be.
On occasion, people want to send me private responses to something I
wrote on a mailing list. In general, I discourage that, because if
the response is interesting to me, it'll probably be interesting to
the list audience as a whole. But if they really want to reply
privately they can request my address by including such a request in a
list post, and I will happily send them my e-mail address. I am not
completely anti-social, I just hate dealing with spam and potentially
losing legitimate messages. My spam strategy is not designed to make
me completely unreachable to the outside world; it is designed to
drastically reduce the amount of spam that would otherwise be sent to
my e-mail address(es), so that I don't have to worry about losing
legitimate mail to spam filters. Judging by what other people say
about the number of spams they receive, and the amount of spam I
receive at work, and the amount of spam I was receiving before I
started doing this, my method is extremely effective.
I like my way better. If you don't like my invalid address, tough
noogies. I will not submit to having my address regularly culled by
spambots, just because I want to participate in on-line forums like
this mailing list. I don't want to, I shouldn't have to, and in fact
I don't have to; therefore I won't. There is enough information in my
sig for real humans who want to contact me to find out what my e-mail
address is, and if someone I don't know personally who wants to reach
me can't figure it out, I won't lose sleep over it.
Yes, it's true, providing certain information in my sig makes it easy
for people who are very familiar with e-mail and the internet to find
out what my real address is. Yes, this does make my method somewhat
vulnerable to malicious people who want to "prove" to me that my
method of spam management is inferior by discovering my e-mail address
and posting it on mailing lists and websites. Yes, people have
actually done this, and each time they have done so the amount of spam
I receive increased noticably, almost immediately -- enough so that
the increase could reasonably be correlated to their actions. So yes,
my method does trust that the people on mailing lists where I choose
to post will behave like decent humans, and refrain from doing that.
People who do not behave like decent humans and post my e-mail address
against my wishes prove nothing other than that they are willing and
capable of being indecent.
Despite the existence and actions of such people, my e-mail address
almost certainly still has a lot less spam sent to it than theirs
does, regardless of how effective their spam filters are. If/when the
amount of spam I receive exceeds what I am willing to tolerate, I will
simply change my e-mail address and start over. I've had dozens of
e-mail addresses since I started using the internet 12 years ago, and
I don't have any particular attachment to the one I'm using now.
--
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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