Newsgroups and Email

MJC wrote:

I appreciate your willingness to be upfront with your name and email
address, but that's exactly what you DON'T want to do if you intend to keep
your personal email account under control.

The address you use publicly doesn't have to be the one you give to
friends and family. I'm allowed as many as eight mailboxes for no
extra charge, so I've set up a private address, a business address
(for eBay etc.) and a public address. The last one is the most
vulnerable, so I use my ISP's web interface to clear junk from the
mailbox. That way wormy emails never get into my computer. (About
every half the messages seem to be bogus Microsoft "updates".)

For about three months I've been using that address for all my Usenet
postings. It averages only about two spams per day, and I'm running
unfiltered. If the spam gets too heavy I can just change the address.
No need to inform anyone since the only legitimate traffic is the rare
private reply to something I've posted.

If you continue to use your correct email address in your newsgroup
activities, a combination of weirdo's, email harvesting robots, and just
plain jerks are going to continue to send you unwanted email to your
personal account. If someone wants to respond to a message you left in the
newsgroup, then they need to respond to you here as well.

I can't recall ever getting email from a weirdo or jerk.

There are some good reasons for sending private replies. I've gotten
"attaboys" from readers who thought I'd put up a particularly
informative post. That's the right way to do it; complimenting someone
in the thread just clutters it up without advancing the discussion.

One guy sent the coordinates for his property corners so I could help
him figure out the land surveyor's figures. You wouldn't want to
broadcast something like that.

Another time in a newsgroup thread I mentioned a deficiency in a U.S.
government web site. Somebody in that organization was lurking,
because a couple days later I received an email from one of their
chief scientists, thanking me for spotting this problem. They had
taken care of it. I'm not sure what amazed me more, this honcho taking
time to thank me, or a government agency clearing up a problem that
fast.

--

Paul Hirose