On Tue, 30 Sep 1997, Tim wrote:
: I tried to send him amil about it, but he has
:some stupid fucking guessing game to figure out what to do.
Flamebait.
Maybe. But I've gotten Bill's rabbit-bounce on another account, and his
magic-word is munged in the message to prevent harvesters from grabbing it
out of the bounce and resending.
: Why
:the hell he doesn't just direct all of his mail into /dev/null,
:I have no idea.
With respect, and I do respect Eli for his posts I've seen here, I think he
is over-reacting just a tad.
A valid question. I see no problem, but on the other hand, I do
selectively "whitelist" so my opinion is biased. I think the problem is
that it bothers certain people to "jump thru these hoops" to get email to
you and it bothers them to get autoresponses, even if they (presumably)
only have to do it once. You know it's the same type that put "Don't send
CC me stuff you send to the procmail mailing lists" in their sig :^>
Well, it bothered me that I'd get 5+ UCEs a day and blacklisting was too
much work with these idiots constantly forging headers to evade the
filters, so now I "selectively" whitelist.
This is definately going off-topic, but...
I think spam has ruined the meduim of usenet and mailing-lists. It has
made it hard for people to respond in a simple manner. I munge my From
line, but solely to make it hard for non-netcom people to just point and
click an unwanted message to me.
Netcom shell customers don't have that problem. :)
But I learned a *LOT* when I started on the Internet from email. Bill,
Era, Eli, Wendigo, Dave Williams, and a lot of others either taught me a
lot or told me where to find relevant information on something they had
posted about. And all I had to do was hit the key for "reply with quote"
in tin.
Can't do that these days. And i think that if when I had started out and
sent a message to Captian Nitpick asking about PGP and gotten a bounce
message i would never have asked him for help again. Becuase i wouldn't
have had the understanding too grasp the principle behind how "whitelists"
work.
I spent an hour tonight cleaning out my folder for newbie type questions.
I don't have the time to deal with them as I get them, and just save them
elsewhere. And try once every couple of weeks to answer them. The only
ones I don't see are the idiots on Netcruiser who munge their email
address and the twits who send html. And I tell both groups why I didn't
read their message.
Procmail should make it easier to handle email without losing the good
stuff. Not make it hard for reasonable people to communicate easily with
each other.
And for the record, between the four email addresses i have I get about
150 spams a week due to ongoing spam-baiting of three of them. Two
thirds of these messages go to /dev/null with no problem. The rest get
sent here at Netcom as potential spam, and gipped for a periodic
review by perl script (developed with help from Bill Evans). And not
even all of these get saved. If I've already got a copy of CASINO from
bozo(_at_)dipshit(_dot_)com I delete spares.
The only message of "value" I lost was a chain-mail one of my sisters sent
me from her new account (first message from there). And thats in a year
of anti-spam filtering. Nor do I see spam in my inbox. Ever.
--
Blessed are they who Go Around in Circles, for they Shall be Known as
Wheels.