On Thu February 24 2005 17:23, ned(_dot_)freed(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com wrote:
Unfortunately this is just not the way things are headed. Users are
increasingly not able to control these sorts of actions being done on their
behalf. For example, Sun filters all incoming mail and summarily discards
everything it thinks is spam. (In fact a recent misconfiguration led to a
bunch
of mail being discarded incorrectly.) I have absolutely no control over this -
no way to change filter threshholds, no personal whitelist, no Bayesian
training, no option to file spam in a spam folder, nothing. And while it is
perhaps true that I wouldn't want and have no business receiving anonymous
mail
sent to my Sun account, I deal with large ISP setups all the time and I can
tell you that many if not most of them are similarly set up and are similarly
inflexible.
I understand, and have a similar situation. What I had in mind
for recipients who might reasonably expect anonymous mail would
be agencies getting reports from "whistleblowers", e.g. US OSHA.
Of course it is hard to tell when the ubiquity of such setups reaches a point
where it truly compromises the general ability to send anonymous email.
Or indeed any email.
But my
guess is that if we haven't passed that point yet we're about to.
Some observations:
o mail used to be reasonably reliable; now an over-aggressive spam
filter is likely to cause non-spam to disappear
o other spam-related "solutions", are so obnoxious that they
discourage correspondence via email
o spam filters frequently mangle messages, especially MIME
messages, to the point that content is unusable
So, sure, some anonymous email will probably fall into a black
hole. That happens to some non-anonymous email.
My conclusion is that overzealousness in the fight against spam
is as much a detriment to utility of email communication as spam
itself is. And I suspect things will get worse before they get
better. In the meantime, though, we shouldn't avoid solving
existing problems where solutions are possible.