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.smith@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.com@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
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