[H-GEN] The declining effectiveness of SpamAssassin

[Greg Black]

On 2004-01-23, Sarah Walters wrote:

> I automatically reject all email from 
> countries that I don't expect to get email from.
> [...]
> ru [...]
> kr [...]
> cz [...]

At first blush, this looks like a good idea, but it just doesn't
work for me.  Although I don't expect to get legitimate email
from any of those domains, in fact I do.

People I don't know see my work and decide to write to me, to
ask me to explain something, to share their belief that they've
found a bug, to request permission to use something in some odd
way, to argue the toss with me over some comment I've made, etc.

I don't want to make it impossible for people to do that, just
because they have the bad luck to live in a country that has a
reputation as a spam haven; just as all the customers of Telstra
don't like it when people in other countries decide to block all
Telstra hosts.

I could go to the trouble of blocking them, with a 5xx message
that includes a URL that points them to some alternate mechanism
for contacting me, but then I have to muck around with setting
something up to replace email -- but I have an email server
precisely so that people can write to me, so this really doesn't
make any sense to me.

Cheers, Greg