Ty Fairchild wrote in response to me,
| All right. I'm game. If worse comes to worse, I can always reinstate my
| present configuration. As of this writing, I have included my filter bypass
| word in the Subject line of the bounce. I will give it a 30 day trial. If,
| during that period, less than eight UCE's breach my filters and make their way
| into my inbox, I shall consider it a success and leave it thusly configured
| until such time as it is no longer effective.
Now wait a moment, Mr. F: my challenge was that, since you were reluctant to
state the bypass word in the autoresponse, you provide instructions for
figuring it out. By going farther and placing it in the subject you have
made it easier than I suggested for a spammer or even a spamming bot to cull.
Tim, for example, whose arrangement I have praised in contrast to yours, puts
it into the text and not, as I recall, into the subject. If this newly
liberalized policy succeeds, then one might deduce that my suggestion would
succeed as well, but if it fails, we cannot tell how well my suggestion would
have worked.
So if your experiment with giving out the bypass word in the subject fails,
please realize that the results will not indicate what would have happened if
you had tried my idea.
| With respect, your moral pronouncements and judgements are not necessarily
| applicable to others, even in similar situations. Though I encourage you and
| everyone to profess their values as appropriate, I also encourage making
| allowances for personal differences which may result in courses of action
| dissimilar to ones you would select for yourself, but which nevertheless
| would not be considered rude or amoral by reasonable people.
With equal respect I encourage you and everyone else who writes an autore-
sponder to consider the results from the position of the person who wrote to
you and receives its text. Wotan's told me that strangers are not welcome
to write to him except (as I understood it) about one particular topic, which
must appear in the subject line to get past his autodeleter; further, if you
use that loophole to send him email about anything else, he will take greater
sanctions against you. Tim's told me that sorry, but he just gets so much
unsolicited mail that he can no longer accept any; but if you really need to
get through to him, here's how.
Now put yourself in the writer's place: I intended no harm against either but
was just in each case trying to answer their procmail questions. And those
are the two responses I got. Wotan's assumed that I am a spammer, case
closed; Tim's allowed that I just possibly might not be a spammer.
I'm assuming that neither had any particular code for me and that both their
autoresponders sent me the standard text mailed to all strangers.
Yours I have not seen, so I don't know how its text is phrased, but if its
bottom line is that the sender is told that no matter what his or her inten-
tions, topic, or need, you will not accept his or her email (he or she cannot
ask you to change your mind because email asking you to change your mind will
also be deleted), then the effect is closer to Wotan's than to Tim's.
Some people here may remember a discussion on this list a couple years ago.
Dan Smith was about to write an autoresponder that explained to people how he
has much more incoming email than time to deal with it. Someone spoke out
against doing so on the grounds that he finds it very impolite to get email
saying that someone else to whom he wrote is too busy for him and how he had
no right to take the other person's precious time.
I posted that a lot depends on the tone of the response. I gave two
examples, one that basically said, "How dare you pester me, you jerk!" and
the other stating essentially, "Please be patient with me; I get a lot of
email and usually cannot answer very promptly." Everyone agreed that it made
a difference; two people jokingly asked me for permission to use my first
example verbatim.
| I see nothing in what you have written that would even _remotely_ be cause
| for me to place you on an "enemies list".
Fine; I don't have such a list, so you're not on mine either.
| The funny thing is: I have no such list, nor would I ever maintain such a
| list. For you to suggest I do is at the very least unfair and wholly
| unwarranted.
I'm glad you don't, but what is unfair and unwarranted is that you misinter-
preted my wondering whether you might have one as an accusation that you do.
It could be argued, though, that you have a suspicion list, which consists
of every human with email access who is not on your list of friends. I'll
back down on this one, because you were within reason to interpret the phrase
"enemies list" as something stronger than the way I intended it.
| I have never said, nor have I ever implied that my E-mail filtering system
| is my default treatment for all humanity.
I have never said, nor have I ever implied, that your treatment of humanity
when they email you carries over into telephony, paper mail, faxes, or
in-person conversations. Still, it is your treatment for email from all
humanity other than those for whom you have made an individual exception;
hence my qualifying it as the "default".
I know only what you have told us about your email handling; as you have said
nothing to us about your in-person communication (no reason to, after all), I
have not spoken about that at all.
| How you made that enormous leap from a small, personal E-mail configuration
| to something that encompasses my real world interaction with all humankind
| is certainly interesting. :-)
How you think I made any such leap and believe I've landed in a place where
I've never been is what's odd here. That you handle your email that way is
from your own statements; your off-line relationships were never under dis-
cussion, and your logic is faulty to apply my comments about one to the other.
| To restate once again: The scope of my procmail filtering, for me, applies
| singularly to E-mail sent to my account. It in no way reflects my _personal_
| attitudes, concerns, actions, values or judgements for the rest of the _real_
| world.
It does reflect your personal attitudes, concerns, actions, values, and
judgments for the subset of humanity who might send you email.
I should modify my original statement: if you set up an autoresponder that
replies to certain specified email, that is one thing; but if you set up an
autoresponder that replies to all email except that which meets specified
criteria, be very careful in how you phrase the response and in how you
handle mail that triggers it, because you're going to get a lot of false
positives.