Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2004 19:19:14 -0500
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
From: Elspeth Kovar <ekovar at worldnet.att.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Email change
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

At 11:02 PM 3/2/04, Keith F. Lynch wrote:

Keith, I've looked through your article in the February WSFA Journal as
well as reading this. Is the following an accurate synopsis?

The WSFA contact address goes to Keith Lynch and to no one else.  Mail to
that address is goes through your personal filters and anything with
certain words or HTML goes into the trash and won't be seen.

You're changing things so that mail to the WSFA contact address still goes
to you but you will accept all email to that address no matter what,
without it going through your personal filters.  You're planning to change
the WSFA contact address monthly, wsfa0403, then wsfa0404 in April,
etc..  On the page with the address you'll have a message saying something
along the lines of, "This address changes regularly to attempt to cut down
on the amount of spam.  Please bookmark the page if you don't plan to
contact us right away."

Mail sent directly to you at kfl at KeithLynch.net will only be accepted if
it's from an address that you've set things to accept but that's just your
personal email, not WSFA contact.  (And you already have more than 9,000
entries in that list.)

Is this correct?

If so, I'd like to suggest an addition to the process.  Set up a permanent
contact address for WSFA, perhaps WSFA at WSFA.org once we've moved over to
Panix.  Then change the message on the page with the temporary contact
address to something along the lines of "This address changes regularly to
attempt to cut down on the amount of spam.  Please bookmark the page if you
don't plan to contact us right away or, if you need the permanent WSFA
contact address, drop us a note and we'll send it to you.  But we'd rather
you not put that up on a website -- just use a link to this page."

I am *not* going to get into the discussion about if this is needed or of
spam with you again, certainly not in writing!  You think that it's
necessary, and right now you're the only person who is an active member of
WSFA, willing to do it, and reliable about answering mail quickly.

As you said in your article,

      "At Fifth Friday, I briefly discussed some of this.  Elspeth
suggested that someone else take over as email point of contact.  I am open
to doing this, but I don't think it's necessary.  My concern is that
someone will volunteer, and won't follow through.  Or that they will follow
through for a while, then let the mailbox sit unread for weeks after it
becomes overrun with spam.  In other words, it will become a less well
controlled version of disposable email addresses."

I'd suggested it because while a Google for my email address shows four
websites with it I still don't get so much spam that I can't easily manage
it.  But it's only been out there for a couple of years -- and remind me to
see about getting it removed from those now that it's not needed, or
changed to an alias once we move over to Panix.

Elspeth