[Techtalk] Over-zealous spam filtering (by Raven's ISP?)

[Christina Zeeh]

Hi Raven,

> I do not recall that membership on these lists required making myself
> available off-list to anyone who cared to hail me. (...)

This has nothing to do with off-list replies. I know that the "correct 
way to reply" is an ongoing and seemingly endless discussion on the 
issues mailing list (which I stopped following and I really don't want 
to get into that now), but many people (apparently including yourself) 
are used to simply reply to the list and the sender. I do that too. So 
if I answered one of your postings with my alternate email address 
(which happens to be hosted by gmx.net), I would receive your message.

> I am sorry that LinuxChix as a whole has deemed itself the judge of my
> administration of my own servers. (...)

I'm not speaking for the list, the LinuxChix "community" or anyone else 
in this thread here. And I'm sure nobody else in this thread tried to 
do this so far.

It is entirely your business whose mail you are dropping. If _you_ 
don't mind dropping my mail because you don't want off-list responses 
and get a copy of every on-list mail anyway, that's fine. But it 
affects _me_ if your server produces offensive output when I'm replying 
to a posting you made on a public mailing list. It is quite the same as 
with an open relay ... I don't care how people admin their mail server. 
But as soon as I get spam (i.e. offensive output) I do have a problem 
with it.

And to Ron (whose reply just came into my inbox):

> Can we give this a rest now? This thread *really* does not belong on 
> the
> "techtalk" list.. does it?

I think it belongs on issues ;-)
Seriously. This whole thread wouldn't have started in the first place 
if James had known that it was Raven's own server. But it 
(unfortunately) is a fact that currently many ISPs and email providers 
block spam without telling their customers and/or giving them a choice. 
Just today on a major German computer news site there was a story about 
an hotmail introducing a new filtering program. And who hasn't heard 
about Apple dropping legitimate emails as spam for their iTools 
customers without any notice?

For me, this thread has brought some interesting insights on the 
effectiveness of a simple domain filter. Your stats are quite 
impressive and your list would certainly be an effective addition to 
any spam-filtering rules people use. I think it's just very, very hard 
for many people to understand that someone would voluntarily dump mail 
without ever looking at it. I must say that I'd feel uncomfortable if I 
couldn't "human-check" my spam folder every once in a while.

I'm very sad to hear that you want to leave LinuxChix because of this 
discussion. I really hope you think about it again. After all, this 
thread was started by someone who thought he'd help you against some 
evil internet provider who drops email from lots of addresses _without_ 
you knowing ;-)

Christina

-- 
"I smile because I have no idea what's going on."