[filmscanners] Re: spam magnet

["Tony Sleep" <tonysleep@halftone.co.uk>]

On 02/04/2008 halftone@troutcom.com wrote:
> Your implication is that I am relying on others (including you) to do
> stuff for me to avoid spam, while in fact you are doing stuff that
> *exposes* me to spam. I am doing my bit by having multiple addresses
> and abandoning those that have been outed -- which happens about once
> every 18 months.

You were asking me to curtail the usefulness of this list to limit your
exposure to spam, by suppressing sender addresses.

There couldn't be any mailing lists unless they were publically exposed
addresses. There couldn't be any support ditto. For some of us email is
mission-critical and we can't avoid having a public address that stays
constant. That means the common preferred solution is spam filtering.

Email RFC's require a postmaster catch-all address for any domain. Whoever
runs that account is going to receive spam. Domains cannot be invisible.
That too means the common preferred solution is spam filtering.

Your approach may work for you, but you're still having to take
inonvenient evasive action against spammers and accept a reduction in the
utility of email because of their predatory selfishness. I hope we can
agree that spammers are the underlying problem here.

> Now that I know posting to the filmscanners list will expose my email
> address, I'll take care to never post.

Yes, that should work, in the same way that never answering the telephone
will completely avoid annoying sales calls.

For those of us who have to expose email addresses to the world, spam *is*
inevitable. The list itself receives on average 3 attempts a day to
*distribute* spam to its 1,200 members, because the address is known to
spammers. That is *filtered* out by multiple levels of email filtering and
subscription control that also prevents viruses being distributed. If I
didn't maintain filters you'd get that crap even if your email address was
unpublished in list mails.

There is nothing wrong with your approach but it can only work for a
minority of people who can burn email accounts as they become unusable.

--
Regards

Tony Sleep
http://tonysleep.co.uk

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