Misguided SPAM Filtering techniques

Sun Oct 21 14:27:24 UTC 2007

On Sat, 20 Oct 2007 13:12:14 -0700
Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm seeing an increasing variety of misguided SPAM blocking  
> techniques such
> that they are starting to become more and more annoying, and, I'm  
> curious as
> to what solutions/work-arounds others have deployed, and, if anyone  
> has any
> ideas on how to get these tactics reduced/stopped?
> 
> Here's the primary hinderance.

Here's one that recenly annoyed me.  I actually got into an argument
over it which was a secondary annoyance - that I lost my temper.

There is a service out there, spamarrest.com but there is probably more
than one, that you can sign up for and have all your email filtered
through.  If something comes that is not whitelisted then email is sent
back asking you to confirm that it is not spam.  I received one of these
confirmation requests for a piece of spam that I did not send out.  I
complained to them that this was not being a good neighbour.  While I
sympathize with their spam problem I did not appreciate that they
turned it into my problem. I deal with my own spam without resorting to
making the rest of the net act as my personal filter.

This person actually got abusive.  He couldn't understand why I would
complain about his attempts to reduce spam.  I could not make him see
that he was just adding to the overall problem.

Of course, I fixed the issue for myself by simply blocking
spamarrest.com.  I have no need to correspond with anyone who thinks
that their spam problem needs to be my spam problem.

-- 
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