Re: How to handle personal email ?
Steve Summit (scs@eskimo.com)
Sat, 31 Jan 1998 22:47:09 -0800 (PST)
In <199801311319.PAA15555@kontti.Helsinki.FI>, era eriksson wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Jan 1998 09:13:26 -0800 (PST), scs@eskimo.com
> (Steve Summit) wrote:
>> "There are a lot of idiots out there." Right. I guess we have
>> to leave it at that; it's a fact we can't change.
>
> But it would be nice to be able to minimize exposure to them, and I
> think this discussion has been useful for many of us.
> Personally, I have removed all mailto: links on all my web pages,
> and post my FAQ with what I hope looks like "this is an autoresponder
> robot's address". I try to direct all people who want to contact me to
> a web page which states repeatedly that I do not want them to send me
> technical questions, with a link to a "background" page if they don't
> understand why.
This I can't do. To me, the net is all about communication, and
I don't want to make it hard for people to communicate with me,
because there *is* plenty of feedback I do want (corrections,
the occasional "atta boy!", etc.). The world can never know
precisely which feedback I do and don't want, so I feel that
filtering my incoming mail is to at least a certain extent
my responsibility; I won't make myself hard to reach just to
deflect the stuff I don't want any more than I'll mung my
address to keep the spammers at bay. My feeling is that if
we're forced to do that sort of thing to keep the newbies and
spammers off our backs, they've won, and ruined the net for us.
I won't go gently into that good night...
Steve Summit
scs@eskimo.com