… I don’t want my employer/wife/friends to see that I’ve contributed something cool to an open source project, or perhaps that I said something stupid 10 years ago.
I host and co-host a bunch of different mailing list archives for projects on web sites, and I never cease to get stumped by how many people are trying hard to avoid getting seen on the internet. I can understand the cases where users accidentally leak information they intended to be kept private (although the removal from an archive is then not a fix since it has already been leaked to the world), but I can never understand the large crowd that tries to hide previous contributions to open source projects because they think the current or future employers may notice and have a (bad) opinion about it.
I don’t have the slightest sympathy for the claim that they get a lot of spam because of their email on my archives, since I only host very public lists and the person’s address was already posted publicly to hundreds of receivers and in most cases also to several other mailing list archives.
I’ve always been proud of my ability to read and respond to email in a swift and reliable manner. I read and write emails every day, and most days I read mails more or less immediately as they land in my inbox.
However, during the recent year or so I’ve noticed that I’m no longer a reliable mail recipient. The amount of spam I get has made me tighten the screws so hard I get my share of false positives. The kind of mails that I need to rescue from my spam bin as they will otherwise suffer the death by delete. But how many do I miss? How often do I lose legitimate mails?
On some of the mailing lists I participate in, the spammers have started to send posts with my email in the From: field (circumventing the subscribers-only limitation), leading to me having to set my own mails as moderated to prevent spam to get posted… 🙁
As one of the last living dinosaurs on the planet still using text-based email clients, I realized that pine has been replaced by alpine and I upgraded to that. When doing some reading up on the subject, I noticed that there’s another old grumpy guy still using this client. I’m not sure exactly what that says…
Anyway, the upside of this switch is that this client is now distributed under a proper open source license (Apache license 2.0), as that’s what I’ve been getting in my face from mutt users for years when I’ve explained what I use! (I mean the complaint that pine wasn’t proper open source)
I get a fair share of spam. I have something like 10 working private email addresses, I’m listed as recipient in numerous email aliases and they all end up in the same physical mailbox where I read them. I’ve also had my existing emails for many years and I’ve shown and used them publicly on the internet all the time. I’m a major spam email target now. A good day I get just 2000 spams, but bad days I’ve been well over 13000 spam emails.
I’ll describe how I have things setup, not as much as to inspire others but more to be able to get feedback from you on how I can or perhaps should improve my setup to get an even better email life.
I consider all mails with spam points >= 3 to be spam. I’ve also tweaked my spamassassin user_prefs to be harsher on (pure) HTML mail and a few other rules, and I’ve added a couple of my own rules to catch spams that previously did slip through a little too easy.
First, I filter out mail from trusted mailing lists that have their own antispam measures.
I catch what appears to be bounces (I have a huge regex) and if it looks like a bounce to an address I don’t send email from I nuke it immediately (and those could be a true bounce are saved in a dedicated mbox)
I have a white-list system that marks all incoming mails from previously marked friends as coming from a friend.
Mails from non-friends are passed through spamassassin. Those with spam points higher than N are put in the ‘hispam’ folder – of course with the intention that these are very very very unlikely to every have any false positives and can almost surely be deleted without check. N is currently 10 but I ponder on lowering it somewhat. Spams with less points than N are put in the ‘spam’ folder, and I need to check that before I kill it because it happens that I get occasional false positives that end up there.
So, mails that aren’t from friends (or from a trusted mailing list) and aren’t marked as spam are then stored in the ‘suspicious’ mailbox
Mails from friends or from trusted lists go directly into my mailbox, or into a dedicated mailbox (for lists with somewhat high traffic volumes).
Oh, a little additional detail: I “mark” my own outgoing mails with an additional custom header with no point whatsoever but to be able to detect when someone/something sends me mail using my own address…
My weakest point in all this right now is the fact that I don’t spam-check white-listed mails at all, so spams that are sent to me using my friends’ email addresses go through and annoy me.
BTW, I did use bogofilter in the past and for a while I actually ran both in parallel (both trained with rougly the same spam/ham boxes for the Bayes stuff) but quite heavily testing I performed at that time (a few years ago) showed that spamassissin caught a lot more spams than bogofilter, while bogofilter only caught a few extra so I dropped it then.
Wherever there are mailing lists, some people eventually bring up the suggestion to move to or to at least offer a web forum alternative as well.
As a subscriber to over 100 mailing lists, receiving several thousands of emails every day I’m a violent opponent of web forums. Why? I’ll entertain you by stating a few reasons for my opinion on this:
If all my 100 lists would be forums, I would have to visit 100 sites to check for new messages. Some forums offer mail notifications on new messages, which would remove the need to poll all sites unconditionally, but that’s still just a detail.
There’s no way to mark individual message to deal with at a later time.
You’re forced to use each and every specific forum “client” instead of a single dedicated and at your choice selected email client that was written and perfected for this purpose.
There are people who prefer mailing lists and those who prefer forums, I’ve come to accept that fact. Thus, when introducing forums as an alternative means for communication, you also risk draining people (and thus talk, opinions, facts) from the mailing list.
By reading thousands of mails per day, I’ve worked out a system on how to deal with them all. Like I filter them in 20+ inboxes on arrival and I read them in a prioritized order and I mark interesting mails as “important” to deal with them later in case I don’t have time at the moment to reply or catch all details.
Several of my inboxes are automatically (renamed and) archived every month to make them not grow inconveniently large.
So please, don’t start more forums. Use mailing lists. Oh, and don’t top-post and/or full-quote on those lists…
I’ve always been proud of my ability to read and respond to email in a swift and reliable manner. I read and write emails every day, and most days I read mails more or less immediately as they land in my inbox.