On 9/27/20 8:13 PM, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
Anyone around here been on Usenet in the late 1990s, and remember this
on-going flamewar, how spam filtering is detrimental, how everyone has
an entitled right to have their email delivered, yadda yadda yadda?
That's what this reminds me of. I'm really getting a sense of deja vu
here.
I was around then. But if you don't think that users care whether
their email is delivered, you're not paying much attention to users.
Ordinary users simply don't trust email to work. They'll use email
only as a last resort, and if they really need to send email, will try
random combination of sender and recipient addresses (because people
often need multiple addresses to try to negotiate the mess). It's that
bad.
they object to. They won't have any effect. People will continue to
use spam filtering methods that work for them, and not the ones that
some other third party approves of, in some way.
Irrelevant. For the most part, "people" don't choose their spam
filtering; they have it imposed on them and often have zero control
over it except to try a different email address.
That was another frequent theme on news.admin.net-abuse.email, circa
1990s – how people are suffering victims of their administrators'
draconian spam filtering policies.
Well, those arguments weren't exactly widely accepted back then, and I
don't think they're widely accepted now, either.
Just because people refuse to accept the truth doesn't mean it isn't true.
But this is a silly discussion. I certainly acknowledge that spam
filtering is hard, and that the state of the art is to use unreliable
heuristics. The point is, even if it's the best that we can currently
do, it still doesn't work very well. We do no credit to ourselves if
we put our heads in the sand and mutter "it's not a problem!".
Keith
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