"James P. Salsman" <bovik(_at_)best(_dot_)com> writes:
It took a few seconds to ignore the spurts of spam that started
the recent mailing list policy threads, but I am now dozens of
messages behind, trying to read and carefully consider all of
the resulting insightful and witty comments.
What needs filtering, again?
Congratulations. You are lucky. I literally am hit with HUNDREDS of
spam messages a day. Very aggressive filtering techniques mean that I
don't have to try looking at those manually, but it would literally
wreck my ability to find important email if I didn't stop the stuff.
Why do I get so much spam? Probably because I've had the same email
address for many years, post a lot, and many of my older addresses
still forward mail to me. (I have some evidence spammers have
addresses of mine that haven't been active since around the time
domain names first showed up in their lists, but luckily all those
addresses are long dead.) (I'm astonished that lots of spammers
apparently have even accidental misspellings of my email address in
their databases -- when I check my logs lots of perr(_at_)piermont(_dot_)com and
erry(_at_)piermont(_dot_)com stuff is there, almost certainly because of a
handful of bad crossposts to me sent to mailing lists over the years.)
To you, maybe, spam is ignorable and causes little damage. To some of
us, fighting it off is literally the difference between email
remaining a usable tool and having it become bogged down in what is
effectively denial of service. I could *not* delete the crap fast
enough by hand for "just hit delete, who cares" to be effective.
The "oh, who cares, just hit delete" crowd are, IMHO, terribly naive,
or personally lucky.
Perry