[dmd-beta] Fw: lucky winner

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Thu, 16 Aug 2012 12:50:34 +0200
Leandro Lucarella <luca at llucax.com.ar> wrote:

> Walter Bright, el 16 de August a las 02:27 me escribiste:
> > On 8/16/2012 2:13 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > >I'm starting to get a lot of bullshit like this on my "DMD
> > >Beta-List-Only" email address, which means this mailing list is
> > >an email harvesting ground. Which is not at all surprising
> > >considering this mailing list is a...*mailing list*.
> >
> > Fortunately, thunderbird's spam filters do a reasonably good job for
> > me. It's nowhere near the problem it used to be for that.
> 
> And you have to deal with spam anyway, unless you manage to completely
> avoid using e-mail, 

That's just simply not true, period. And that's easily one of the
biggest myths on the internet:

My primary address (which, yes, I do use, and more than
any other address) doesn't get *any* spam, and I've been using it for
years, *without* any spam filters on either the client or server side.
The beauty of that is that not only do I *not* get any false positives
for spam, it's not even *possible* to get false positives. Which is
*exactly* as it should be. (What's the point of a spam folder if you
have to go into it to get a legitimate message? None, it completely
defeats the whole point.)

The way I achieve this is by:

1. Only giving out my real address to real people, never machines, and
only ever posting it with some "user [at] domain [dot] com"
obfuscation (which is still generally avoided).

2. For machines: Such as mailing lists, website logins, businesses,
etc., for these I create a special email address dedicated to that
particular business, website, mailing list, etc., and don't use it for
anything else. That way if I do get spam, I know exactly where the
weakness is (DMD Beta's mailing list system, in this case), and can
kill the email address and replace it with a new throwaway (if it's
even worth it).

No spam, no heuristic bullshit, no false positives. So yes, it
*IS* possible, and not at all difficult. You'd be surprised just how
few leaks there really are to email harvesters. Most systems are
surprisingly resistent to leaking out addresses. Just not public
mailing lists.