Re: intro questions

[Michael James Pruitt <mpruitt@cs.uah.edu>]

[: hacktivism :]

[snip other good responses to prior questions]
> > 3.  How do I stop from getting spam and stupid chain letters?

Spam? What he said. Chain letters? Be an insufferable prick
to anybody who sends you a "stupid chain letter". Unfortunately,
my experience has been that the majority of the chain letters
that I receive are from friends and family. Fortunately, if you 
take the time to explain to these people that the vast majority of 
these chain letter things are nothing more than human-propogated 
email "viruses", you'll definitely help stop the flow of
junk email from said friends and family. Unfortunately, this
is usually because they stop sending said email to *you*, not
because they stop sending junk email in general.

Sigh. Some people just can't get over the fact that bill gates/
disney/american red cross/ted turner is *not* going to give
every 5,000th person $100. Or donate a penny per email. Sesame
Street is not going to be canceled. You can't make money fast.
The imminent death of the Internet is not quite so imminent.

My advice is to get a good email reader that supports filters 
(eudora pro is quite good for windows/mac; nmh and elm are
very good in the unix world) and learn how to use filters.

With a wee bit of practice, you can automagically send a 
reply to junk email, add sender to bozo list, and chunk
the email in the bit bucket; all behind the scenes without
you even having to know about it.

>4.  How come every time I try to unsubscribe from a list that I haven't eve
>  asked to be put on (on onelist, or wherever) it doesn't work?

Some "mailing lists" are technically "opt out". Basically, they
add you to the list as a "service" to you, and, should you decide
that you no longer want to have their "service", you have to 
manually unsubscribe. Here's where the fun begins. If it's a
real list, you usually have to unsubscribe using the exact address
that they're mailing to. If "joe@mycomp.myorg.org" is how they
have you subscribed, you have to unsubscribe with that address.
(They don't want unscrupulous hackers trying to deprive you
of their service to you by forging email from you. How thoughtful
of them). The problem results when your outgoing email is munged
and drops off the unintersting part, in this case "mycomp". Ask
your local email guru for advice on how to examine headers with
your email program and force the "From" and "Reply-To" fields.

If the "list" is actually a spam list, each bounced message
automatically gets erased from the Bcc list (the address was
invalid). If no reply is received, the address is left, just
in case that it's valid. If a reply is received (positive or
negative) then they *know* that they've got a valid address and
they then put a gold star by your name and make certain that
you get any other "email services" that they might have. And
just because they're such swell people, they give your proven
valid address (for a small fee) to lots of other swell people
with "email services" that they're certain you'd like to receive.

> > 9.  How many places does each e-mail I write go to before it reaches it's 
> > (hopefully) final destination?  Is there any way to minimize this?
> 
> No, there's no real way to minimise this aside from installing a direct
> dialup/other connection into the ISP/Service of every person you wish to
> correspond with.

Assume that all of your unencrypted outgoing email is read by
the people you'd least like to have read it. In addition to 
making you paranoid, it serves two useful purposes: 1) you
think twice before sending out scathing email about your boss
to a fellow cow-orker and 2) PGP begins to look like a good 
alternative to plain-text and worth the intial hassle it takes
to set it up.

> > 10. How do I know this list isn't being archived somewhere?
Assume that it is. Because it is. See above answer.

michael

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