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Re: Spamming list members

2002-09-11 23:30:05
When I said in near shock, addressing Alan,

| > You actually whitelist the addresses to which you write, so that people
don't
| > have to navigate your hoops when they reply?  I do believe you are the
| > only prove-you-love-me whitelister who does that.

LuKreme responded,

| Really?  It seems bloody obvious?  What's the rationale for NOT doing
| this?

The rationales are laziness, self-centered inability to consider the issue
from the other person's position, self-importance, a smug rapture with any of
one's own ideas that precludes analysis before implementing them, and a basic
failure to understand that choices and actions have consequences.  In short,
they're the same entitlement issues that usually serve as the rationale behind
having a prove-you-love-me setup in the first place.

Consider also what Stan just posted.  Prove-you-love-me texts invariably take
the tone that the implementer's time and attention are far too important for
email from mere mortal specks like you, that you're a worthless piece of crap
spammer, and how dare you consider yourself worthy of a Greater Creature's
notice, but just in case you might repent for the sin of sending email, the
implementer will be a gracious and forgiving Superior Being and deign to read
your undeserving prose for laughs if you'll perform the assigned penance.

None of them think it through to grasp that the only people who see the
autoresponse are those whose mail should have been accepted.  None of them
realize that the autoresponse should be phrased to fit the people who read it,
not those who don't.  None of them realize that the mistake is theirs for
rejecting legitimate personal email as spam, not the sender's for daring to
write in the first place.

None of them have the sense, much less the consideration, to say something
like this: "My email filters are returning your message because they believe
that it is spam.  If you're reading this, they were wrong, and I apologize.
If you still want to send this to me, please reply to this return of your
message without overriding the Reply-To: address nor the reply subject.  That
way it will bypass my filters, and I'll get to see what happened, and I'll fix
them so that in the future they will let mail from your address through to my
inbox.  Again, I am very sorry and hope you'll re-send your message."  They
could achieve the same effect by admitting that it was their own error --
which it is!  It's not the sender's responsibility to prove innocence; it's
the rejector's duty to acknowledge and correct the mistake.

But even a polite autoresponse doesn't make it a good idea.  Alan says he
whitelists the people to whom he writes, but I doubt that any others do.
Consider what happens when one of them writes to another, (even if the second
one whitelists his/her own addressees).  The autoresponses bounce back and
forth between the two, growing ever longer as each one includes the previous
one's text with all of its inclusions, and neither ever gets delivered.  It's
not as if any of them did any loop detection!  And even if the first person
whitelists addresses to whom (s)he writes, what if the second one's
autoresponse comes from a suffixed address?  You get the same loop.  Also,
much spam has a real person's email address forged as the sender; bounces from
invalid addresses (those who sell addresses to spammers never prune their
lists; they brag about quantity, not results) load down the email of the
victim, and these autoresponses make it worse.

Nonetheless, there is a simple solution.  Anyone who feels that keeping spam
away is worth missing legitimate email should just stop using email.  That
will stop 100% of spam with no failures, it will not insult anybody, and it
will save money.  No other email will arrive either, but such a person is on
record as not caring about that.

There is only one way to deal with mail when your filters cannot tell whether
it's spam or not: shunt it to a separate folder and LOOK at it.  Your brain
can tell when your computer can't.  Prove-you-love-mes and other whitelisters,
who think they're so superior to mere humans, are in fact calling themselves
stupid.  "Was that spam?  I can't figure it out for myself."  Sheesh.

For the record, I did once go through Alan's hoop --- but it was to alert him
that he had misinformed another poster here by making an embarrassing typo.  I
did that for the benefit of the other person, not for Alan's.  When I say that
most prove-you-love-me setups are worse than his, I am not calling his good,
just less bad.  To be frank, if he hadn't forewarned us about his arrangement
and his prove-you-love-me had come as a surprise, I'd have posted the
correction on-list and not cared about embarrassing him.



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