[wxqc] Administrivia

[Steve Dimse]

On Sep 21, 2006, at 9:55 PM, Shell Shrader wrote:

> My motto is death to all spam.  If that means disabling an  
> anonymous function then so be it.  I'm sure you've got enough to  
> keep up with.
>
Philip should do what he needs to do, but I do have a wild hair about  
all the "improvements" people make to cut out spam. Maybe if they  
worked, it would not bother me.

Unfortunately, very few of the anti-spam techniques actually result  
in decreased spam, more often they often just result in increased  
workloads for people like me that work heavily on the internet.

For example, when findU began it was hosted on my home DSL line. A  
well meaning user reported every spam message he got to an automated  
spam processor also had an email signature file that said something  
like "See where I am at http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi? 
call=k4hg". This line was automatically appended to every email he  
sent, including the spam reports. The automatic spam site was too  
stupid to recognize that this was a signature, and sent an abuse  
message to my DSL provider claiming that I was spamvertising my web  
site. Four times message were sent to my ISP, the first time there  
was just a warning message, the other three times my service was  
automatically suspended. I spent an average of a dozen hours on the  
phone for each of these four episodes trying to get my name cleared.

Another example... I get something like 50 messages a day from people  
asking questions. Most are just people too lazy to google for an  
answer (my favorite is a few times a year I get something from a  
college student that says I need to do a GIS project, will you do it  
for me!), and I have a one-button reply that says I am too busy to  
answer such questions. A handful of messages are either something I  
know is not available on the web or is phrased in a way I feel  
compelled to answer. It might take me 10 or 15 minutes to compose a  
typical reply. I cannot begin to express my anger when I get an  
automatic reply stating my email has been blocked by some spam-blocker.

I have an excellent Bayesian spam filter, it puts the roughly 1000  
spam messages I get every day in their place, and does not shift the  
burden to other people. If everyone did that, spam would really  
decrease, because it would not get through to people!

Steve K4HG