[SATLUG] Seeking robot immunity in my feedback form

[Brad Knowles]

At 1:00 PM -0600 2/3/07, Donguitar wrote:

>  I've never used filtering in my email.  I dislike the notion because
>  it doesn't eliminate the problem, it defers the need to deal with
>  it until a time of your choosing but you've still got to deal with
>  it or risk missing email you'd much prefer to have received.

I wouldn't do it unless I had no other choice.  But with 90-99% of 
e-mail being spam, and getting hundreds of legitimate messages per 
day, I don't think there is any other practical alternative.

Even for people who have much lower volumes of legitimate mail, the 
fact that 90-99% of all e-mail these days is spam means that 
virtually everyone is going to have to have some form of filtering in 
place, even if it's done silently by their provider and they don't 
know about it.

>                                      So, while I can
>  accept such forms as something of a necessary evil I
>  was hoping for another alternative and by raising the
>  specter of "accessibility" you've simplified my choices.

There are necessary evils, and then there are solutions that are 
worse than the disease.

Unfortunately, many so-called "solutions" to fighting spam are 
actually in the latter category, because they were thought up by 
people who don't understand the real problems, and this is compounded 
by the fact that they are usually implemented by people who don't 
fully understand the original concept (flawed as it was).

This general problem is equally applicable to other situations where 
people are trying to prevent the abuse of resources that they have 
been provided -- such as web forms.

>  I think our new host's mail server offers some sort
>  of filtering and I can create an address to be used
>  solely for feedback.  Now, if I could just get kmail
>  to run on Windows *sigh*.

I'm confused.  Why is it that you need to run Windows in order to be 
able to use this feature?  I can understand wanting to use a 
particular MUA, that's not a problem.  But why is Windows a factor?

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author
Co-author of SAGE Booklet #15 "Internet Postmaster: Duties and 
Responsibilities"
Founding Member and Platinum Individual Sponsor of LOPSA: 
<http://www.lopsa.org>
Papers: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4> LinkedIn Profile: 
<http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>