[conspire] How not to do antispam, latest in a continuing series

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> PS - I take it you don't love Richards autoresponder.

Richard M. Stallman's 'I'm travelling and may be slow responding'
[paraphrased] autoresponder was intelligently crafted:  It carefully
_avoids_ replying to mail addressed to mailing lists.  And I've never
seen it send any other sort of abusive mail, either.

If you wish to acquire good responder software, I recommend you ask RMS
for a copy, as I'm sure he did an excellent job.

Notably, RMS does _not_ deploy it as any kind of C-R antispam responsebot, 
i.e., not a mailbot responding to anyone attempting to reach its creator
with [paraphrased] 'My user is so tired of spam and is such a special
snowflake that I'm going to generate tons of additional, new spam
telling the Internet what special contact rituals shall henceforth be
required to reach him.'

Richard is a very ethical person.


I personally attempted briefly to deploy an autoresponder bot as my
contact address for use in http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
(and you can still see its address there), but was unable to make my bot
intelligent enough to _not_ generate backscatter spam.   This was
probably around 2002.

So, I made an ethical decision around a month later that, if I couldn't
make one that didn't cause active harm, I could not in good conscience
use it at all -- and turned respond-auto at linuxmafia.com into a simple
alias reacheing me directly.  

There's a lesson for you somewhere in there, if you decide you're
willing to listen for a change.