On Fri, 15 Jan 2010 23:04:57 -0800 Stephen Hansen <apt.shan...@gmail.com> wrote: > It may or may not be in violation of the RFCs, but the modern reality of the > internet makes certain "rules" of the RFC's meaningless.
They aren't meaningless. They also aren't "rules", a term that I did not use. The Internet is an anarchy that works on voluntary cooperation. The RFCs are simply a codification of best practices. If someone doesn't want to be part of the community they should simply leave. It's not like anyone is forcing them to participate. > Spam is a major issue for some people; and some people do not want their > email address to be trivially harvested, and usenet exposes that address So non-trivial harvesting is OK? If you are on the Net you will be found. If this is a real problem for you (generic "you", not Stephen) then get a throwaway account and hide behind it. Spam is an issue but it is pretty easy to deal with on the personal level. Between RBLs, Spamassassin and Bayesian filtering I hardly ever see a spam these days. > very easy. You will frequently see people mutate their address, sometimes > they'll do so in such a way that if you look at it you'll know that if you > remove parts you will get a real address-- these people allow for personal Slightly better than using @invalid.com but these people aren't hiding very well. Spammers probably get most of those already. All they do is make it inconvenient for legitimate correspondents. > direct communication. Others don't really want to receive any email at all > based on their newsgroup posting, and want all of your messages to go to the > group instead-- they generally provide an email address which is utterly > meaningless. Or worse as is the case with @invalid.com. > It may or may not violate certain RFC's, but there's nothing rude about it. > Its people trying to engage a community and yet hold some measure of control > over how they engage that community. They have every right, IMHO, regardless > of what an RFC may say. That's right. And I have every right to filter out those people who don't want to be part of the community that I want to be part of. > People who may use an invalid.com address simply don't want to be contacted > individually and directly. Why is that rude? They post to a public forum, They asked a question and directed answers to someone who was not involved in the conversation. How is that not rude. It caused an email to be sent to a domain that was not involved in the conversation, required them to process the message, send back a response (because they do follow the RFCs) require my system to process the bounce and finally for me to deal with the message telling me that the address I thought that I was sending to doesn't exist. Convenient for the person asking the question, inconvenient for everyone else. > and they simply want to communicate solely in that public forum. They have Then they should use a forum, not Usenet or a mailing list. > no moral obligation to provide a means for personal or direct communication, > in my mind at least. To me, demanding a real address from people in the > usenet medium which has nothing even vaguely like privacy protection is I won't even get into my opinions on gatewaying between Usenet groups and mailing lists. :-) > rude. If someone chooses to provide it, great. If not, just as fine. One is > obligated only to share with us what they wish, and all power to them in > whatever capacity they wish to share. And I have no obligation to share with anyone who doesn't want to follow the RFCs. That's why I blacklisted @invalid.com. My choice. That's the last on this subject from me here since it is off topic. If you want to discuss privately you better have a real address. -- D'Arcy J.M. Cain <da...@druid.net> | Democracy is three wolves http://www.druid.net/darcy/ | and a sheep voting on +1 416 425 1212 (DoD#0082) (eNTP) | what's for dinner. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
