Re: Anonymous email users

On 25/06/24 05:17, Thomas Passin via Python-list wrote:

On 6/24/2024 5:51 AM, Barry Scott via Python-list wrote:

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On 23 Jun 2024, at 06:58, Sebastian Wells via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:
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The spammers won the spam wars, so even if you have someone's real
e-mail address, that's no guarantee that you can contact them. You
certainly wouldn't be able to contact me at my real e-mail address,
unless you also had my phone number, so you could call me and tell
me that you sent me an e-mail, and what the subject line was so I
can find it. I don't even open my e-mail inbox unless there's a
specific message I'm expecting to find there right now.

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My email address is well known and yes I get spam emails.
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I use the wonderful python based spambayes software to detect spam and
file into a Junk folder. It works for 99.9% of the emails I get.

 I use the Thunderbird mail client and I just use its built in spam detector.  I don't know how it works but it's pretty darn good.  Very few false positives or false negatives.  And it learns each time I classify a message as "Junk", in case it missed one.
 

I am subscribed to a lot of mailing lists. I just checked and I am getting ~3,200
emails a month of which less than 200 are spam.
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A few years ago the spam count was greater than a 1,000 a month.
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I have been using spambayes for a very long time, 20 years I guess at this
point and bayesian categorisation has stood the test of time for me.
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For me the spammers have not won, I have the tech to keep ahead of them.

Aside from the attractions of the new, and the 'shiny', what email-antagonists didn't anticipate, was that as fast as they moved to non-email messaging, the spammers, advertisers, and malcontents would simply do the same. Thus, a variation on whack-a-mole, as folk move from platform to platform trying to stay-ahead and find an illusion of safety. Quite how one out-runs human-nature is an issue philosophised-over by the (Ancient) Greeks (and was no-doubt old even-then).
Paradoxically, applying for an account elsewhere usually involves providing an email address. Even backing-up a cell-phone (communication tool) to the cloud requires an email address(!!!)
Most of the non-email platforms are provided by organisations who have 'other uses' for your personal-data (and not forgetting GMail and MSFT's email services).
Python mailing-lists are covered by the Code of Conduct and monitored by ListAdmins. Thus, there are controls which limit the impact which advertisers and others with non-pythonic aims might otherwise exert!
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Regards,
=dn