cat /dev/DiBona/brain: ASK Me Again?

"Pray. To ASK the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a
single petitioner confessedly unworthy." - Ambrose Bierce

In my last
entry, I spoke
about the installation of
ASK
on my mail pipeline. I received some vitriolic responses comparing me to
satan/gates/spammers/et.al. for daring to consider doing such a thing. The entire
discussion of how we in the Open Source community treat one another (read: poorly)
aside, there were some valid points in the responses.

That said, I did consider them before implementing ASK. ASK, you might
remember, is a challenge response system. Any challenge response by
itself fundamentally is part of the spam problem, as much as are those
auto-responses from foolish spam firewalls telling you, the spoofed
address, that you sent spam. This is why I slid SpamBayes into the
pipeline before ASK. What I wanted ASK to do is to act as a
gateway for stranger mail.

I didn't put enough things in before ASK and I realized, mostly after I
wrote the article, that what I really wanted from ASK is not the challenge
at all, but the white, grey and blacklisting. But then I got to thinking,
let's see if the people are right in that the ASK program is a problem
before implementing no-sending or using procmail for whitelisting.

The short answer is they are and they are not right about the problem
that a properly pipelined ASK represents to the Net at large. The long and
Boolean correct answer is you cannot run ASK without sending some
e-mail to those who don't need or want it. It not as though I was
sending out thousands or hundreds of these false confirmations a day, but
I was sending out ten to twenty. If that was all there was to it--and I
were a tad bit more selfish--I'd say that's okay and continue to use ASK.
But the real problem was that some of the newcomers to Linux that e-mailed
me simply couldn't get through the confirmation step.

Should I care? Should I use ASK as a "you must be this smart to e-mail me"
test? I don't think so; plus, I'm not selfish, which is why I've pulled ASK
out of the pipeline. So the mail pipeline now contains this: MTA - ClamAV- SpamBayes - Mailbox.
Let's see how it does. If you care, I'll keep you posted, but I am aware of the intense boredom that
erupts from "I get more spam than you" conversations. I'm also
going to implement a Web form so people can add themselves to my
whitelist from my TV FAQ or something like it.

If I can paraphrase Eric Allman (of Sendmail fame), he always tells
me the rule about spam is everyone hates it, but they love to talk
about it. So this is the second occasion on which I've wasted your time
and mine with spam
talk. There won't be a third, I promise. I'm not going to lie to you, there was
some satisfaction in not seeing spam in my inbox for that period, but it
was tempered by my nervousness at missing other mail.

Also, one project I thought I'd draw everyone's eyes to, if they haven't
already seen it, is the Slimp3 audio streaming server.
It doesn't require you to have the Slimp3 or Squeezebox hardware--although
that stuff is really great--and it's a terrific way of organizing and
enjoying your music collection. But, I'll talk more about how cool these
all are another time.