On Friday 20 July 2007, John Rudd wrote: >someone that Skip Brott didn't attribute wrote: >>> Why is it my responsibility as a holder of a valid email address to >>> accept mail from anyone who wants to send me the mail? As the owner of >>> the email address or, as the admin of the domain's mail server, I have no >>> obligation >> >> to >> >>> accept your mail at all. >>> Obligations should be on the sender. > >You are correct that you have no obligation to accept email from me (nor >anyone else for that matter), the issue of "obligations upon the sender" >depends on which obligations you're talking about, and which sender >you're talking about. > > >If I'm replying to a question you asked, then you are the _original_ >sender, and no, it is not my obligation to jump through your C/R hoops >in order to get the answer to you. If you want the answer to your >question, it's YOUR obligation to make sure you can receive my answer. > > >If I didn't send the message at all, but this is backscatter, then it is >your obligation to prevent backscatter to innocent bystanders. It's not >my obligation to deal with your challenge messages, and it's entirely my > digression as to whether or not I'm going to report you to a blacklist >for producing backscatter. At that point, it becomes YOUR obligation to >get yourself off of a blacklist. > > >Further, I as the sender have no obligation to participate in your >anti-spam mechanism. It's YOUR mechanism. You feed it, you configure >it, your CPU cycles are spent on it. I have no obligation to >participate in the program you use for deciding "is this spam or not". >I have no obligation to devote my time and my CPU cycles to your >anti-spam program. It's rather rude for you to assume otherwise.
All very well stated. So if "you" send me a C/R, for any reason whatsoever, if it actually gets past SA, it either is fed back as spam to train my bayes or deleted and promptly forgotten about. But don't expect any of us to be happy when, after composing a 4 kilobyte response from scratch in response to your plea for help, something that took half an hour of my time typing with 72 year old fingers, and looking up the data so that my answer might be correct, only to be greeted 90 seconds later on my next mail suck, with a C/R from you. Then, because you're an ass, you didn't get the answers you asked for, so you keep on flooding the list with your question. At that point, I'll not reply again, but I will add your email address to my procmailrc file as one to be delivered to /dev/null. And you had better believe me when I say I am not the only one here who will do that, there are far more knowledgeable people here than I who will do that, maybe even quicker. And I do not make it a habit to expire those entries in my procmailrc. Once you are there, goodbye. And no one but you gave me reason to put you there. Oh, did I mention I don't like C/R systems? I don't... -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Q: What do Winnie the Pooh and John the Baptist have in common? A: The same middle name.
