Someone is spending me (the admin of use Perl;) spam to prove that the email to them, that they requested, is not spam. It's unsolicited, it's commercial, and it's email. That makes it spam. It amazes me that the users of this system completely miss the irony of it. And there's no way I am going to respond to it.
From: xxx@xxx.xxx
Subject: Re: [use Perl] Stories for 2002-07-13
To: pudge@perl.org
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2002 08:51:21 -0400
X-Priority: 3
X-Library: Indy 9.0.1-B
X-ChoiceMail-Registration-Request: ChoiceMail registration request
The recipient, xxx@xxx.xxx, asks that you click on the URL
http://www.digiportal.com/cgi-bin/cmregister.pl?data=xxx
to request permission to send emails.
This recipient is using a permission-based email system that requires
senders to be granted permission to contact the recipient.
The purpose is to prevent junk email messages from disturbing the recipient.
The recipient apologizes for this minor one-time inconvenience.
The original mail that you sent to the recipient has been stored temporarily
and will be released once your registration has been accepted by the recipient.
There is no need to send your original mail again.
For more information on how you can subscribe to this service, please contact
sales@digiportal.com
Good example why "guard programs" won't work
da on 2002-07-13T15:39:27
Hint to commercial providers of such services: send subscribers a daily record of "quarantined" email, and give them the ability to look at the messages whenever they want; otherwise they'll forget about mailing lists they need to pre-approve. This is speaking from experience running my own mail filter.
Or, require a three-week trial period, where all the email goes through, but tagged as if it were blocked.
It took me a few weeks to weed all of my mailing lists out of the spam filter, because I'm too lazy to go through 20MB of messages to find all the lists. I think spam filters should always come with an email-lint that will pick out "good" addresses from the user's saved mail folder(s).
(Hm, while it's at it, it could remind you to email Aunt Lucy who's been waiting for a reply for three weeks...)
