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What?
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[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, Carl, please wake up so I can
welcome you to Real World. Now you have seen why I believe the
so-prevalent idea of using email filters (as opposed to a much more
agressive approach of 'hunt them down, torture and kill them') is
such a dismal failure. Why is email filtering such a failure, with
its 'white lists', 'black lists', 'grey lists', search for certain
words/phrases, IP addresses, and other gyrations?
Well, aside from the fact we should not have to go to that effort just
to send/get a piece of email, the smart-mouths around here tell us
that (1) we have no right to take a more aggresive stance with the
cretins who have essentially ruined email for all of us, and (2) the
cretins may 'get even' by suing us for denial (of their) service, and
(3) most of us are brain-diseased idiots with our tin foil hats and
how would we know we had chosen the right person to experience our
wrath; we couldn't possibly know anything about anything since
'knowing anything' is a monopoly exclusive to themselves, and (4)[one
of my favorites] as the nitwit said to me one day here, "Oh, we have
no right to tell others what they can and cannot do with their
sites". My isn't that _so precious_. To my response, he wrote back and
ordered me to NEVER SPEAK TO HIM AGAIN!! and I have not, but he
occassionally writes me again here and pops off his mouth each time
he overflows.
So he, and his ilk will continue to struggle along, filtering their
mail while I and my ilk will continue to (as time permits, there being
so much of it to spend our time on) continue to forward the most
choice and juiciest bits of spam each day to trained investigators who
will correctly identify the spammers and viri writers _on a one for
one basis_ telling them to LEAVE US ALONE, and allowing the
investigators to act as our agents in making these statements to the
offenders.
You see, Carl, you cannot filter based on name or IP address; they
have gotten so smart they use _our real names and email addresses_ to
send us their stuff ... although 'ptownson@telecom-digest.org' is not
exactly how I send legitimate mail out from here but please do not
tell them how my stuff is _really addressed_ least they start using
that instead.
You cannot filter on the basis of message content, because sometimes
I may want to write a legitimate message which contains some of the
words or phrases which otherwise would trip the filters.
And although there is much to be said about 'freedom of speech' and
the 'bill of rights' and a search engine avoiding anything which offends
the sensibilties of the Chinese government, somehow I do not feel that
the internet cesspool full of spam and viri is exactly what our
founders had in mind when we are warned that 'we must not dictate to
other sites what they can/cannot do on the net', despite what the
modern day Usenetter would have us believe. _They_ would tell us that
when we walk through the commons we have to watch where we step to
avoid getting 'that stuff' on our shoes. I keep asking WHY, their
response is only to tell me about my tin-foil hat, etc. PAT]
Carl Moore (cmoore@ARL.ARMY.MIL)