30 Mar
2005
30 Mar
'05
1:52 a.m.
On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 at 21:48 -0500, Jon B wrote:
rude?? really? why?
after years of having to sift through spam all the time and losing
real mails in the spam folders, i'm paranoid about releasing my real
address onto the web in any form. so far i think i've only received
the brute force type mails to my real address, where they just guess
your address, and, of course, the few that get sent to my disposable
addresses.
20 per day!?? eek! sounds like a huge pain to me.
i've received exactly 10 spams since feb 28th (today is march 29th),
all of which are to disposable addresses (from mailing lists like this
one) and i can delete the address if someone big decides to put one on
their list and send me tons of internet pharmaceutical mailings. i
think it's a nice way to operate.
I used to be careful and care about where my email address went and
worry about spam. Then I realized that gee whiz I'm spending more effort
trying to avoid spam then I would be just dealing with it. I discovered
Paul Graham's "A Plan for Spam" essay and ESR's wonderful bogofilter
program. I have flung my email address around shamelessly for over two
years now, and I currently have only one or two "unsure" messages that
are really spam to deal with per day. The rest go to a spam file that I
mostly ignore but go dig in when I don't get that email from ebay that
I'm expecting (and of course I periodically purge it). Except for ebay
emails, most of which have a low SNR anyway, I very rarely get any false
positives. Even some legit ebay messages make it through - bogofilter
knows something I don't about telling the difference (or it has secretly
been observing my ebay auctions). Bayesian analysis is a pretty naive
and simplistic approach to email filtering, and yet it works amazingly
well. I choose to let my computer do the hard work in dealing with spam.
Not to say you're wrong in any way, but only to point out what I do.
--
.O. Hans Fugal | De gustibus non disputandum est.
..O http://hans.fugal.net | Debian, vim, mutt, ruby, text, gpg
OOO | WindowMaker, gaim, UTF-8, RISC, JS Bach
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