sean's place

Life Without Email

Most of my good friends know that I’m an email snob. I have an elaborate setup for the automatic aggregation, categorization, and filtering of my email. It takes a little time to setup, but it successfully removes most spam and increases my efficiency in reading email.

Lately though, a great deal of spam sent to my primary email address at seanrees.com has been evading my filters. This is quite a depressing fact, indeed.

In fact, if you can afford to keep your domain on a private colocation somewhere, do so. On a high-profile host like pair Networks opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

I installed FreeBSD on my Sun Blade 100 the other day and have just managed to finish the upgrade to the 64 bit time_t values (this required two make world’s, followed by an agonizing mergemaster on the dumb ofw console). In that time, I lived without email. Life was good. I was a happier fellow.

Email is a great tool. It keeps people communicating. It even provides a non-intrusive way to contact someone – unless it happens a lot.

I have long been a spam opponent. My solution to the spam “problem” is to simply add a notation to the capital crimes statutes. Yeah – criminally prosecute the spammers, sentence them to death, go through the rest of the legal procedures, then carry it out. Spam is an invasive, expensive, and totally wasteful method of spreading junk. It costs millions in lost productivity, transit, and storage. Spammers pay practically nothing to send out their trash so some people – stupid people – can buy whatever they happen to be peddling, if anything at all.

I don’t support Bill Gates on his crusade to pay for email. That’s just plain money-grubbing. This is where capitalism sucks – people go to great lengths just to turn a profit. Sometimes, it’s just not worth it. That’s another blurb, though.

I’m all for the deprecation of the current email system. I want email that’s authenticated and secure so all email is guaranteed to be from some sender (person/software/whatever). I want it such that no same identity can create unlimited alter-identites to further punish us with their worthless wordage.

Ok. I’m done whining.

Email is working again. SpamAssassin is cranking away. I will probably try out DSPAM soon.