Am I awfully intolerant?
According to a quick search of groups.google.com, I’ve been using the same email address for almost exactly 9 years now and in that time I’ve never succumbed to the temptation to monkey with my mail headers and start hiding my obscured email address down in my sigfile beneath a sign saying ‘Beware of the leopard’.
Why? Because, if someone wants to respond to something I’ve said, it seems to be the height of rudeness to expect them to do anything other than simply hit the reply button of their mail client—generally people (well me for certain, I can’t be sure about everyone else) don’t bother.
But there’s something worse (apart from the spammers who cause the problem in the first place) than the invalid ‘From’ header.
I don’t like the challenge/response school of spam stoppers. If ever a system was guaranteed to wind me up it’s this poorly thought out monstrosity. The idea is that any mail that doesn’t come from a known sender to a known good target address is treated as possible spam and is put in ‘quarantine’ and a challenge is sent back to the sender so they can verify that they’re for real. I’ve come across two different variants of this. The first requests a simple reply sent to a one time email address, but a dedicated spammer could actually respond to these, and (heaven forfend!) spam could end up getting through. So, the more sophisticated (and annoying) option is to demand that the sender go and check a website where a suitably disguised word (easy for a human to read, but hard for a computer) is used as the challenge. This takes rudeness to new heights. Yes, spammers seem to be doing all they can to render email useless as a medium by swamping us with crap, but that’s no excuse for threating your correspondents with naked suspicion and borderline hostility.
It’s that sort of hostility that discourages people from writing to you in the first place.[1]
So, I’ve decided to repay hostility with hostility; I’m instituting a policy where I will not replay to any challenges of messages that I actually sent, and I will always respond to challenges sent to forged addresses in my domain. I urge you all to institute similar policies.
1 Especially if you challenge them when they’re responding to a mail you sent them in the first place.
