In article <fo65t4$32e$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Keith F. Lynch <kfl@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> Keith F. Lynch <kfl@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>> You're letting the spammers cut us off from each other. Their
>>> intention may not be to shut down email between people who don't
>>> already know each other, but it's the most obvious bad effect of
>>> their actions.
>
>> They're not cutting me off from anybody I want to hear from. If
>> I recognize the sender and/or the subject line, I read the mail.
>
>You never want to hear from anyone you don't already know?
Depends. What are they talking about? What's the subject line
going to say?
>
>Last month someone I had never heard of sent me HTML email with a
>subject line of, "Can I ask this question?" Both HTML email and such
>a generic subject line are typical of spams.
I'll take your word for it, though I don't think I've ever seen
one under that title. Still, if I got an email from some unknown
sender with that title, I'd probably open it and look at the
first screenful. I can do that with impunity because my UNIX
system doesn't, nay, cannot open attachments. If "Can I ask you
a question is followed by "Do you crave humongous wealth?" or "Do
you want to satisfy your female in bed?" I hit d. This doesn't
happen very often, that I have to open a message to discover it's
spam.
Note also that if anybody sends me anything in HTML it will come
out in the form of scattered recognizable words interspersed with
gibberish. If I actually know the person and the topic is
something I know about, I'll send mail back saying "Please send
me only straight ASCII text; my newsreader can't read HTML." If
the mail (to the extent I can decipher it) is trying to sell me
something or otherwise annoy me, I just hit d.
>> I glance at the list of names/subjects every time I log in, and I
>> can tell in a second or two that nothing on it deserves reading, and
>> I apply the dreaded D STAR.
>
>You obviously get a lot less spam than I do. I usually get a few
>hundred thousand each day. Sometimes over a million.
This is quite true. I get maybe a couple dozen per day?
Anywhere from zero to ten per login, where the number of logins
per day is maybe a dozen. I am not at all certain HOW you manage
to get a few hundred thousand spams per day; I can only say (for
about the fourth time), you do what seems best to you in your
situation, and I'll do what seems best to me in mine.
>True, except that anyone not in certain spammy countries can email me
>on my current disposable address, which can be found at the URL that's
>at the bottom of all my Usenet postings, websites, etc.
For the fifth time, if it works for you, do it.
>
>>> I understand that bayesian filtering works well for people who get
>>> not more than a few thousand spams per day. You might look into
>>> that.
>
>> /googles bayesian filtering
>
>> Oh good grief, now you want me to study higher mathematics.
>
>You don't need to understand Bayes' theorem to run such software any
>more than you need to understand Maxwell's equations to listen to a
>radio, or the Navier-Stokes equations to ride in an airplane.
Now you're beginning to sound like Gary Farber -- remember? --
when he was trying to tell me how to filter things on the Web,
and kept using terms I didn't understand, and getting angry when
I said I didn't understand them, and saying "You aren't stupid!
You understand this stuff! Just do what I tell you and it will
all work!"
I wound up saying,
>I think I have finally figured it out.
>
>Gary really *IS* speaking Outer Mongolian. He's been speaking it
>for several years and although he still has an accent, other
>speakers can understand him. But, because it's not his native
>language and because he isn't a professional Outer Mongolian
>bard, he assumes that everyone he meets here in Manchuria, not
>far from the Outer Mongolian border, speaks it at least as well
>or better than he does.
>
>Stretching the analogy to breaking point....
>
>So here I come, and I don't speak Outer Mongolian, I barely speak
>Manchurian, and I'm complaining about those nasty little flies I
>run into every time I go to Outer Mongolia, and he says, "Oh, the
>paddy flies? All you have to do is burn zwoot on the household
>altar."
>
>I say, "I don't think we have a household altar, and what's
>zwoot?"
>
>........
>
>Many, many misunderstandings later, we finally figure out that
>what's been bothering me is not paddy flies but house flies,
>which he doesn't even notice because they don't sting, and anyway
>the remedy for *them* is not to burn zwoot on the household altar
>but to sacrifice a gledehopper and bury it under the threshold.
>By which time Gary is in despair over how dense I am and I am
>three-quarters decided never to try visiting Outer Mongolia
>again.
So let's not go there any more.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djheydt@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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