begin quoting Paul G. Allen as of Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 11:00:40PM -0700: > MattyJ wrote: > > > >I think what it will mostly do is annoy and irritate people trying to send > >the legitimate mail. > > > >If I ever got one of these messages from my friends or family memebers I'd > >delete them out of my addressbook. > > > >It's not *my* responsibility to maintain *their* spam filter. It's > >offloading work to the wrong people (the wrong people being me and, > >obviously, Lan. :) ) > > Now herein lies a problem with Spam. Everyone thinks it's not their > responsibility, that it belongs to someone else. If you want to use > e-mail, then you, and me, and everyone else should do our part to keep > the pricks from taking advantage of it.
Exactly, but you have it turned around. The problem with spam is that some pricks are perfectly fine with their *own* anti-social behvior, but nobody else's. When I posted a message to the mailing list, I got an unsolicited request to "click on a link". So far as I'm concerned, that counts as spam (even though it fails the technical requirement), so I'm not about to spin up a browser just so I can follow a link. Worse, it scales poorly... if a dozen people join a mailing list with this sort of thing, then the established members of the mailing list would each get a dozen such requests. Now it starts to resemble actual spam, as those dozen people are annoying the posters to a list. > This seems to be the general mentality of many folks regarding many > areas of not only technology, but every part of life in general. "It's > not my responsibility, I don't want to deal with it, let someone else > fix it and take care of it. Please, spoon feed me." I see a different mentality -- "You should be obligated to do my work for me so I don't have to bother." This is the fundamental problem with spam -- it's so easy to spam a bunch of people, and if they aren't interested, they can just delete the spam, no harm done, right? And yet, we bitch about spam. Why? Because the emergent effects of a bunch of people doing something almost harmless results in an awful lot of harm. > I have been planning to add ASK (Active Spam Killer) to my mail server > for some time. It allows for white lists, which of course I would > implement - adding all my friends, family, mailing lists, etc. to it. > It's possible I could miss a couple people, or new friends or family > might send me an e-mail that may not be in the list. IMHEO, if it's too > damned hard for them to click "reply" when the system asks for > confirmation, then I don't need their e-mail. Then you have the attitude of a spammer. After all, you're trying to save yourself some effort on your part by offloading effort to someone else. That's the problem with the "what's so damned hard" arguments -- especially when it comes to spam. What's so damned hard about clicking on "delete" when you're not interested in what's being sold? The answer is the same in both cases: you're using the computer to save YOU effort at MY expense. What you should do is only ask for a confirmation reply when the sender has set "X-Honors-Active-Spam-Killer: yes" in their headers; that way you won't be _part_ of the spam problem in your efforts to "fight" spam. Let people opt *in*. > Not adding a mailing list > address to the white list would be a dumb thing to do and could impact > all on the mailing list. Yup. If there were a way that I could keep my posts to a mailing list from going to someone who's going to send me an automated request, I'd do it. Just because I'm a jerk that way. -- Automation should help everyone, not merely offload annoyances to someone else. Stewart Stremler -- KPLUG-List@kernel-panic.org http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
