On 7/16/02 5:57 PM, "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
But without rules, you can't teach the recipient what's right (with a cattle prod, if necessary), and without rules, the lynch mob has no binding authority.
Where, by "rules", here, we mean "rules about what it acceptable mail"?
Well, we're talking past each other a little bit, but at the same time, not. Because I think there's still a responsibility on the list admin, because when someone signs up for a list, they're delegating some responsibility over who can access their mailbox to the owner of the list, and the agreement between the two are the rules set up about acceptable content. So you can't duck some responsibility here.
Oh, by the way, there's few ways guaranteed to PISS ME OFF more than someone who signs up for a mailing list, and then starts bouncing selected pieces of the mail because of filtering systems. Which usually happens because their admin installs stupid filters... (I don't care if you throw them away, but I hate showing up in the morning to 50 bounce messages because of some flakey content filter...)
Right now, for instance, one of the lists at apple is having a discussion about coding problems. And the user starting it served up a code fragment that included:
int xxx = 0
[...]You can imagine the chaos that ensues among the STUPID IS FILTER IDIOTS who do overly simplistic filtering and assume it actually does something useful.
But I'm not bitter.
(and I'll be curious to see just how many bounces that I or barry see from THAT simple notation.....)
That sentence seems to assume that the majority of the people *falling in* the tarpits are people doing it by accident. I don' think that and I don't think *you* think that.
Yes, I do. Since I (for the most part, most of the time) have the felons locked out of the system pretty well, most of the people who cause problems on my systems aren't trying to f--k with the system, they're people who are oblivious, confused, or misguided. Even the spammer over the weekend meant no harm, which doesn't mean harm wasn't caused. It was a classiv case of "my cause is so important it justifies doing this" -- which, he found out the hard way, a few hundred people disagreed with him over.
By which I meant, "sigs of people in your address book." No, this doesn't solve the "stupid user" problem... but you don't *solve* that with technology.
You solve it with a LART.
Sometimes, the best solution is a public flogging, to teach everyone else to be more careful next time. But if you overdo it, people tune you out, too.
Stipulated, but they're 80-90% of the market. I think even skewing for "non-Windoze users send more mail, you would still be about 70%, intuitively.
We're working on that (a quiet voice whispers: "but a f---ing mac already! It has unix inside for all you geeks, too!")
Chasing people who directly harvest your listmanagement machine in person seems quite another.
*That* you can't do on a case by case basis? Are you getting harvested every 5 minutes?
You want to find out? Create a honeypot. Put some email addresses on it. Attach it to your home page. See how quickly you start getting e-mail to those addresses.
You'll usually find the answer is "days". Once in a while, it's "hours".
No, I mean in other cases. You're using webharvesting, it seems, as your major motivation here; it doesn't seem to me -- please don't take this wrong -- that there's evidence that it's really a big enough problem to solve (for people who don't send 40M pieces of email an hour).
I don't think you're looking close enough. Run a few honeypot tests and see how often people sneak a peek at YOUR system. On mine, it's a few days.
-- Chuq Von Rospach, Architech chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/
Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.