Reverse E-Mail Blockage.....

[Tim]

Tim:
>> If I had to check up on it, I don't consider it trustworthy.

Robert Holtzman:
> You don't entertain the possibility that not all spam filters are 100%
> correct or that no software is 100% reliable, given the fact that it's
> all developed by humans, none of whom are 100% infallible?

I don't care why it's unreliable, since I'm not trying to fix it.

> Did it ever cross your mind that the software might not be so crappy,
> but that the user might not know how to write filters correctly?
> 
> I really get tired of people blaming the software, and yes, there is
> some really crappy software out there but a program that has been in
> widespread use for a long time has almost all the bugs fixed and ain't
> all that crappy.

While it's true that some people can't their configure software, there's
plenty that just isn't configurable (no user options, or no client
interface to do so, the service provider just provides an on/off option
for filtering, as a whole).  I'm certainly going to blame the tools,
when the tools *are* bad.

In the past, I've emailed friends, and my first or second posting has
gone into their spam bucket, without them doing anything about it.

e.g. Emailing a friend at their hotmail address, from a hotmail address.
The same with yahoo.

Sometimes the reasons are completely unfathomable, other times you can
see the anti-spam headers shovelled into the mail, and some of the
applied assessments are just plain ludicrous.

ISPs and major mail service providers are in a prime position to do
really effective spam filtering, yet few of them do a good job.  But
that really is the best place to do the filtering, not on your own
personal PC, which has no access to the honeypot data a large server
has.  Spam has made email horrible to use.  Anti-spam solutions has made
it even worse.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point
trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the
public lists.

George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.