Re: test

On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 08:08:37 +0000, Thorsten Ruffle-Brandt
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 04:57:53 +0000, Jacey Bedford wrote:
>
>> Just trying a new anti-spam address
>
><rant>
>
>Have you ckecked whether anyone owns the domain getlost.to? If someone
>did, or in fact if I went and registered it now, any spam to your
>"anti-spam" address would end up in someone else's mailbox.
>
>This is truly clueless, an ignorant and egotistic way of "dealing" with
>the spam problem and should be discouraged as much as possible.
>
>I would have sent this to you in an email but you have kindly omitted to
>give any valid email address. Have you any idea about netiquette?
>Obviously not, or you would have sent your test post to a test newsgroup...
>
>Annoyed of Dartmoor.
>
></rant>

You can know quite a lot about netiquette without knowing that you
should use test groups for testing. Jacey's a longstanding contributor
here, and over several years I can't recall her being impolite to
anyone. 

Wrapping your tirade in <rant/> tags doesn't really excuse you. Did
you get out of bed the wrong side? 

As for fictitious email addresses - this is a technique most of us
have used at one time or another. I used [EMAIL PROTECTED] for
years, until someone registered mySurname.co.uk. Back when I started
doing that it seemed ridiculously unlikely that anyone would want to
register that, but the increasing commercial potential of the Internet
meant that, sooner or later someone was going to figure out there was
a profit in it. 

Anyway - guess what happened. When mySurname.co.uk started running
email servers, they started getting spam that was "intended" for me,
so they sent me an email asking me to stop posting with that in my
headers. I was happy to comply, and if someone comes along and
registers ReplaceThisBitWithMySurname.co.uk I'll give that up too. 

So Jacey, don't sweat it. Domain names don't belong to anyone *unless*
they are registered, which getlost.to doesn't seem to be. You never
know - if someone *does* register it, the resulting email
correspondence could turn out to be really nice. Maybe you'll get a
gig in Tonga out of it!! 

The one valuable thing that Thorsten points out is that if possible,
your headers should include sufficient information for a human to
contact you directly. 

Thorsten - I'm sure you're not really as grumpy as that. Some days it
gets to us all! 

I'm off to go and register REMOVE_THIS.com  :-) 

-- 

Dominic Cronin
Amsterdam