Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2003 03:02:20 -0500 (EST)
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFAList at KeithLynch.net
Subject: [WSFA] Re: 'spamming' the list
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

ronkean at juno.com wrote:

> What makes spam so very annoying, apart from the simple fact that it
> is unwanted, is its sheer volume and the fact that so much of it is
> so stupid, and so much of it is fraudulent.

Right.  But mostly the volume.  Believe me, I don't want to filter.
I resisted filtering for years.  But I was finally forced into either
filtering or giving up email.  My filters now catch over a thousand
spams on the average day, with occasional peaks as high as ten
thousand.  Most of these spams are short, but some are the size
of a Tom Clancy novel.  Even if I had the time to look at all of
them to see if they're spam, I wouldn't have the disk space on
my ISP.  My 50 meg quota would overflow whenever I went more than
a few hours without logging in.

I average a half hour a day updating my filters.  Whenever a spam
slips through, I try to find a rule that would catch it, and then I
test that rule against my last five years of email (including every
email ever sent to this list) to make sure that it would not have
caused *any* false positives.  If even *one* non-spam would have been
falsely flagged by that rule, I reject that rule and try again.

> But occasionally posting a notice concerning an entrepreneurial
> activity by a WSFA member which might well be of some interest to at
> least a few other members should not be considered spam, as the term
> is normally understood.

I do not consider it spam, and I have never blocked any such message.
This list is fully automated.  I would probably win some kind of prize
for artificial intelligence if I could write a parser which could even
identify whether a message was commercial or not.  That's not how my
filters work.  Anyhow, most spam is *not* commercial, except in the
sense that most of it asks for money.  About as "commercial" as bank
robbery.

Even if my filters blocked every spam that asked for money, if they
blocked no others, hundreds a day would still slip through, mostly
religious, political, revenge, inflammatory, and incoherent spams.
And of course viruses.

Any message sent to the list by a WSFA member will automatically go
to the list within a minute or two, unless they're sending HTML or
posting from an ISP in Taiwan or something.

If any WSFA member wants to post ads here, they're more than welcome
to do so, and always have been.

Please, if anyone thinks I've done something unreasonable, *talk* to
me.  Don't just assume I've turned evil.  Thank you.

You missed a good meeting.  Adrienne announced that today (i.e.
Friday) was J.R.R. Tolkien's eleventy-first (111th) birthday.
This is noteworthy because his Lord of the Rings Trilogy begins
with Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday.  One wonders whether Tolkien
ever thought about his own 111th birthday, and cast his attention,
however briefly, on the first Friday in 2003.

It reminds me of Ayn Rand's character Howard Roark in _The
Fountainhead_, who in the Spring of 1922 estimated that he had just
sixty years to live, so he'd better make the most of it.  That would
mean he would die in the Spring of 1982.  Ayn Rand herself died in
the Spring of 1982.

This upstaged my mentioning that writing yesterday's (i.e. Thursday's)
date was as easy as one-two-three.
--
Keith F. Lynch - kfl at keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/
I always welcome replies to my e-mail, postings, and web pages, but
unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) is not acceptable.  Please do not send me
HTML, "rich text," or attachments, as all such email is discarded unread.