Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2002 14:06:59 -0800 From: Dave Hayes <dave@jetcafe.org> To: dever@getaclue.net Cc: Dave Hayes <dave@jetcafe.org>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Bystander shot by a spam filter. Message-ID: <200212302207.gBUM74175262@hokkshideh2.jetcafe.org>
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Douglas A Dever <dever@getaclue.net> writes: > Previously, Dave Hayes (dave@jetcafe.org) wrote: >> Hear hear. >> >> Would it be possible to file a class action civil suit against >> blacklist organizations on a similar basis? > Why would you want to? You had to ask, and you had to ask *me*. Very well...I said a lot of this 10 years ago and I'll say it again. ;) SPAM is not a technical/internet problem. It's a cultural problem. The same force that puts billboards on highways and infomercials on television brings you SPAM. =Nothing= you can do will really be effective at completely stopping it without blocking legitimate email. Marketeers exist and are going to find some way to grab your attention and send you a message, regardless of the medium. Fighting it wastes energy and time better spent on other positive things. Blacklisters (e.g. SPEWS) have, of late, been blacklisting more than just spamhauses, they are blacklisting innocents. In effect, they are attempting to use their blacklist to force our support for their agenda. This is far far worse than spam, in my opinion. > It's time for everyone to understand that e-mail is not free. I think a lot of people understand that. Attempting to force them to understand anything is a futile endeavour, regardless of the thing you want them to understand. Try it sometime. > Sending spam over someone elses network costs them money. When you > spam my customers, I have to pay for the bandwidth, the disk space, > and the manhours in the call center to explain to customers how to > protect themselves. Consider the volume of SPAM that you complain about. If that volume was legitimate email, would you be complaining? I daresay that you wouldn't. Thus your complaint is about the content of the volume of email in question. I consider any complaints about content of human to human communication highly irrelevant as a long time email administrator, irrespective of the content. But I digress... There's two things you can do that I think are more sane than blacklists. One is to use some kind of personal or site-wide spam tagger. I use spam assassin, which works well enough as long as you defang it away from using blacklists to tag spam. You want to tag the spam only, but still deliver it. Let people decide for themselves what they want to see. Tpwo is to teach people about the concept of the "innerbox" which is necessary even with a spam-free internet, cause there are more people out there than you can handle in your inbox. The "innerbox" is generated by filtering email where From: lines match a list of people that you want to respond to at a priority higher than your regular inbox. It's not hard to set up in most mail readers. ------ Dave Hayes - Consultant - Altadena CA, USA - dave@jetcafe.org >>> The opinions expressed above are entirely my own <<< Honest (adj.) - Someone who is secretly regarded by everyone as an enemy. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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