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Re: [Asrg] Fwd: Returned mail: see transcript for details

2003-03-31 09:55:06
In <p06000d13baae078e502d(_at_)[192(_dot_)168(_dot_)1(_dot_)104]> Kee Hinckley 
<nazgul(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com> writes:

At 11:59 PM -0700 3/30/03, Vernon Schryver wrote:
This little drama is related to the spam problem.  There is a component
of human nature that hates purposefully not being heard.  Senders of
bulk advertising are often irrationally upset about being filtered.

You skipped from "humans" to "senders of bulk advertising" very nicely
there.

"Senders of bulk advertising" are humans also.



Several times now we have seen people using tools meant for stopping
spammers, as a way of stopping normal human conversation.  And they
are doing so without even the common courtesy of notifying their
correspondent.  In the real world you would say, "I'm sorry, I don't
want to talk about this any more," or "This will be my last message on
this subject."

The bounce message from the block *was* a "I'm sorry, I don't want to
talk to you any more" message.  Ok, maybe it wasn't as polite as it
should be, but it is the same thing.




If this is going to be typical of people's use of anti-spam tools then
I think we should give some serious thought to the UI of such tools.

Yes, UI issues of spam filter need much more attention paid to them.
In particular, bounce messages are often far more confrontational,
cryptic and impolite than they should be.

One of the things that following this list has convinced me of is that
if you are going to block email, you should try very hard to make the
sender's MTA generate the bounce.  (You certainly shouldn't just
/dev/null the email.)  Even if the sender's MTA doesn't generate
particularly friendly or understandable bounce messages, at least it
will be consistent and there is chance that it will be in the right
language. 


                          I think that's a large part of my hatred for
challenge/response of any kind.

I think a large part of the objections to challenge-response systems
can be eliminated by only generating a challenge if a reasonably good
spam filter detects it as probable spam.  Most personal emails would
make it through unchallenged.  In the case that a challenge is
generated, you can give specific reasons why sender's email looks like
spam.  Different types of challenges could be generated depending on
how spammy the email looks.


-wayne

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