On Tue, 8 Apr 1997, David W. Tamkin wrote:
wotan(_at_)netcom(_dot_)com brought up new information; he has not been doing
what I
thought, and all that I have said about his setup is inapplicable. I would
have stood by it if he were actually doing what his autoresponse led me to
believe, but he isn't. I apologize to him and to the list for that.
My comments heretofore were fitting for what I believed his arrangement to
be, but they are not pertinent to what he actually does. His autoresponse
misled me. (I still feel that its text was not well phrased.)
Its deliberate. :-)
After spammers, the most frequent pest in my mail is neophytes
to (mail|news|internet|etc) who would rather I help them via e-mail
instead of usenet groups where I normally do such things.
He explained ...
| Stuff in junk-box is spam.
Wait a moment -- so email from unrecognized senders is shunted to a junk
box and not deleted as your autoresponder said? That makes a world of
difference. I would not do that myself but I would never question anyone's
decision to do it.
Makes it eaiser to re-filter at some later date. I use a perl script to
extract pertinent info from each message, and it then moves messages of
interest to me to a seperate folder for later reading. Evenutaly I plan
to have the rest get bounced to the appropriate postmaster.
Thank you for clearing that up at long last.
:)
| And the only stuff I /dev/null is from either known spammers like
| cyberpromo or those using mail-agents like extractor.
This is all very different; your autoresponder's text told me quite another
story, and that was all I had to go on when I spoke of your arrangement.
I used to use a more freindly, and responsive message. Worked with great
care and revieewed by others. And the clueless frequently abused it.
Since switching to this, not one has abused it. And many people have used
one of the Three loopholes I have to get into my mail. Why someone would
add an X-loop line, I don't know.
| Review of the logs indicate I didn't want *ANY* of it. I didn't recognize
| one sender, and most subjects were what you see on typical spam.
How are you sure that the letter from that unrecognized sender was
undesirable? (I'm not saying that you were wrong; maybe its subject line
made it clear that it was spam.)
Good guesser. :) Combined with reading several groups where current mail
spammers are mentioned. It also helps in keeping spammers out.
| You misunderstand. The premise is that we build a list of people to hear
| from. And treat the rest in some fashion as we desire.
I did understand that; the problem was that your autoresponse misinformed me
of what that fashion you desire for unrecognized senders is. You have every
right to give higher priority to mail from known friends (I do too), but I
questioned the advisability of deleting all other email on the grounds that
the senders must be spammers. Since it turns out that you don't do that, I
cannot ask you why you do it. That's someone else's job.
| Currently my filters are directed towards setting spam aside. When i get
| tie, they will be modified to set potentially acceptable mail aside.
Setting it aside is not the same as trashing it sight unseen. If you
currently set spam and potentially (but not definitely) acceptable mail
aside in the same place, I have no objections. So everything I have said
about your autoresponder is wrong, including what I said about it in my
response to Mr. Fairchild a few minutes ago, and I must retract it all. I
have accused you of freezing out unrecognized senders based on your own false
confession, so I regret the mistake and I apologize to you and the list for
having believed what you said about yourself.
Accepted.
--
A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.