Wed 14 Nov 2007
30 Days Of No Computer Usage For Stupidity!
Posted at 13:26 +1100
Somebody in India has added my email address to their Spam blacklist. And they are subscribed to the django-users mailing list (a list to which I've posted over 80 times so far this month). That's not a problem. Mistakes happen. Spammers misuse other peoples' addresses as the "from" address and some people don't realise this (we'll call that mistake #0, but it's so common as to be almost fait accompli). The fact is that all my messages are otherwise scoring -4 to -6 (possibly even better sometimes) in SpamBayes, meaning they would get through easily without the 100 point penalty for blacklisting, but people are fully entitled to configure their spam filters however they like.
What gets my goat is how badly this person has messed up from that point onwards. Their spam filter replies to every single message they receive from my email address. Which means every single time I post to the list, I get this free reply message that is pointless. Mistake #1: spam filters should never reply to messages they process. You're just replying to somebody who is either the wrong target (if they're not a spammer) or who doesn't care (if they are), so sending a reply serves no purpose except to clog up inboxes. Further, the reply comes form postmaster@..., which would be okay, except that the postmaster account doesn't exist for that domain, so we've got mistakes #2 and #3 rolled into one: sending email from a non-existent account and not having a postmaster account for reporting problems (an obvious RFC violation and well-known blunder).
Mistakes happen. Mistakes that impact other people, repeatedly, particularly when I'm one of those other people, are not so understandable. I'm pretty close to unsubscribing from django-users as it is, since it's just a huge time drain for me with little benefit. This person is inadvertently (if they're configuration is deliberate, well ... @$%!) pushing me over the edge. When I rule the world, there's going to be an accounting for this kind of behaviour.
Topics: venting