Anonymous email users

dn PythonList at DancesWithMice.info
Mon Jun 24 18:29:08 EDT 2024


On 25/06/24 05:17, Thomas Passin via Python-list wrote:
> On 6/24/2024 5:51 AM, Barry Scott via Python-list wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On 23 Jun 2024, at 06:58, Sebastian Wells via Python-list 
>>> <python-list at python.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> The spammers won the spam wars, so even if you have someone's real
>>> e-mail address, that's no guarantee that you can contact them. You
>>> certainly wouldn't be able to contact me at my real e-mail address,
>>> unless you also had my phone number, so you could call me and tell
>>> me that you sent me an e-mail, and what the subject line was so I
>>> can find it. I don't even open my e-mail inbox unless there's a
>>> specific message I'm expecting to find there right now.
>>
>> My email address is well known and yes I get spam emails.
>>
>> I use the wonderful python based spambayes software to detect spam and
>> file into a Junk folder. It works for 99.9% of the emails I get.
> 
> I use the Thunderbird mail client and I just use its built in spam 
> detector.  I don't know how it works but it's pretty darn good.  Very 
> few false positives or false negatives.  And it learns each time I 
> classify a message as "Junk", in case it missed one.
> 
>> I am subscribed to a lot of mailing lists. I just checked and I am 
>> getting ~3,200
>> emails a month of which less than 200 are spam.
>>
>> A few years ago the spam count was greater than a 1,000 a month.
>>
>> I have been using spambayes for a very long time, 20 years I guess at 
>> this
>> point and bayesian categorisation has stood the test of time for me.
>>
>> For me the spammers have not won, I have the tech to keep ahead of them.

Aside from the attractions of the new, and the 'shiny', what 
email-antagonists didn't anticipate, was that as fast as they moved to 
non-email messaging, the spammers, advertisers, and malcontents would 
simply do the same. Thus, a variation on whack-a-mole, as folk move from 
platform to platform trying to stay-ahead and find an illusion of 
safety. Quite how one out-runs human-nature is an issue 
philosophised-over by the (Ancient) Greeks (and was no-doubt old even-then).

Paradoxically, applying for an account elsewhere usually involves 
providing an email address. Even backing-up a cell-phone (communication 
tool) to the cloud requires an email address(!!!)

Most of the non-email platforms are provided by organisations who have 
'other uses' for your personal-data (and not forgetting GMail and MSFT's 
email services).

Python mailing-lists are covered by the Code of Conduct and monitored by 
ListAdmins. Thus, there are controls which limit the impact which 
advertisers and others with non-pythonic aims might otherwise exert!

-- 
Regards,
=dn


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