This discussion has wandered far from my original mention that I found it hard to reply to people using an invalid email address. I see no real connection to python except insofar as at least one spam-filter mentioned is written in python!
Just to add an observation, the people writing here have obviously had many different experiences with their email addresses and whether yours is hijacked in some way, and made less useful, can even just become down to random luck. But SPAM filters can also be manipulated and cause you to lose mail. I think some people have been reporting email from a source they do not favor, such as for political reasons, that then ends up being junked for people who would welcome the messages. And, I can well imagine how something like a post about python programs can start being filtered out because some key words commonly use end up being used a lot in some kind of SPAM and the filter "learns" to filter those out. Imagine of "python" appeared in lots of actual SPAM messages as the war moved on, such as in the metadata designed to make it look legit. Email addresses can go bad for many reasons. My wife had a nice simple address like jane.sm...@gmail.com that was messed up probably by well-meaning people when another Jane Smith had an email address like smith.jane or janesmith123 and they or others typed in the more straightforward ones. It seems we ended up getting odd email from many continents such as e-tickets for airplanes, initial estimates or bills from vendors for products in places we have never been for services rendered in say Tennessee or South Africa (well, I've been in Tennessee, but) and subscriptions to internet magazines or groups that sent lots of messages, or conversations between lots of people (all To: or Cc:) that included her email address wrongly and even when she replied to ask to be taken off, the conversations continued for months as many kept hitting reply-all, ...) And, obviously, with so many people using the address wrongly, SPAM followed. Of course, choosing a strange name designed not to be typed by accident, has it's own disadvantages. But for those who want me to CALL their unspecified phone number and tell them the subject line and then maybe you will look for my message, FUGGEDABOUTIT! I have a cousin who does a trick with her phone service where she never answers and I have to run some gauntlet to identify myself and then wait for a call back. After a few times, I solved the problem and simply never call her. Admittedly, making it hard for an email address to be abused in a forum like this is understandable. Making it very hard to reach you legitimately when the message is that your house is burning or just that your appointment is canceled, may not work as well as you think. And, FYI, I check my junkmail regularly and I have a fairly high rate of finding things, including posts on forums like this one, that are NOT in my opinion junk as I ordered them and they are on topic and not easily visible as having committed some kind of sin. And as I use many email services, I still find a high rate of false negatives everywhere. It would not surprise me if a phrase like "not SPAM" gets this message dumped into /dev/null -----Original Message----- From: Python-list <python-list-bounces+avi.e.gross=gmail....@python.org> On Behalf Of Chris Angelico via Python-list Sent: Monday, June 24, 2024 9:49 PM To: python-list@python.org Subject: Re: Anonymous email users On Tue, 25 Jun 2024 at 11:41, Grant Edwards via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote: > I've been using the same e-mail address for about 20 years. I've use > that e-mail address with probably close to 100 retailers, charities, > open-source projects, media sites, and various other organizations. Mostly the same, although in my case, I've had multiple email addresses for different purposes (and still kept all of them for decades). > I get at most a few spam emails per week [I just checked my spam > folder: 8 in the past 30 days]. And Gmail is very, very close to 100% > accurate at filtering them out. I can't remember the last time I > actually got a spam message in my inbox. > > > A few years ago the spam count was greater than a 1,000 a month. > > I'm baffled. Is Gmail silently rejecting that much junk before it > even gets to the filter that puts stuff into my "spam" folder? > It really depends on how you count. On my mail server (can't get stats for Gmail), I have a number of anti-spam and anti-abuse rules that apply prior to the Bayesian filtering (for example, protocol violations), and any spam that gets blocked by those rules isn't shown in my stats. And then I have a further set of rules that nuke some of the most blatant spam, and finally the regular trainable filter. I should probably keep better stats on the stuff I don't keep, but at the moment, all I actually track is the ones that the filter sees - which is roughly 25-50 a day. So.... yeah, Gmail is probably rejecting that much junk, but most of it for protocol violations. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
