151–160 of 365 posts
Sounds like somebody has the write-protection 'clicky-thing' in the wrong place. If I had a penny for every time this has caught me out.
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It's a lot of effort and one which you wouldn't expect businesses to do this so I don't really see why open source projects should be any different.
If there's a limited amount of car companies, why not just compile one email with a big list of contact numbers, and use that reply template whenever you get such an email. I suppose you could even send it out automatically based on filter conditions?
People seeking technical support often resist redirection once they've been assured, through direct contact, that they have the attention of someone knowledgeable.
To put it plainly: your solution doesn't work. Our team was responsible for the tech support for a very generically named Usenet service. Very often, people looking for the .com version of our .net service would email us continually looking for a resolution to something or other. No amount of explanations deterred them and we often had to stop responding.
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Why do people have a publicly listed personal phone number though?
When I was writing some shareware and other PC software, there were basically two ways to reach me: write me a snail mail letter or call me. So it was pretty normal to publish your personal phone number (and address). I wouldn't do it today, but those were pretty much the only ways to contact people.
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Knuth is a one man shop. Torvalds is leading the biggest open source project in the world, and Jobs was leading one of America's largest corporations by market cap. Leading is different than writing.
Being a leader does not justify being an asshole.
Comparing Knuth to Torvalds and saying "look, you don't have to be an asshole to be a great leader" is like comparing Usain Bolt to Dean Karnazes and saying "look, you don't have to be really muscular to be a great sprinter." The comparison is pointless because Karnazes isn't a sprinter just like Knuth isn't leading major software efforts.
Find a successful leader of a large-scale piece of software who doesn't have a reputation for being an asshole and use them for the comparison.
I usually break E-mail addresses into the following categories: Monolithic. That one email address you put on business cards, hand out at conferences, post in public forums. Basically a catch-all that quickly becomes a firehose for spam and bacn[1] but every now and then you get an actual reachout as described in this post. They are infact gems when you get them, and always remind me how precious E-mail, as a loose s…
I use a catch-all domain, and every site/business gets its own @example.com. For business cards and friends I use something like myname@ or contact@ When one businesses address starts getting spam I blackhole it. Similar to the + suffix trick but works on any site.
As you point out, the ability to blackhole any of these one-off addresses makes the approach a great way to deal with spam and quasi-spam. It's a shame that so few people are set up with the necessary software or infrastructure, so it remains a bit of a fringe approach.
I particularly enjoy the reaction of some retail employees when they think, for a moment, that my e-mail address includes the name of their store. "Your email address is 'abcpeetscoffee'?" "Well, yeah, for this particular transaction it is."
I have had a similar problem for about two decades now in regards to eCards (virtual greeting cards). I own youknowwhat.com and one of my email addresses is youknowwho@youknowwhat... Turns out that thousands of people every year think they are being super clever by putting my email address in the "From" field. So of course I get zillions of "receipts" for these eCards. "Sister, I hope you feel better soon" ...is the…
The worst for me, is when I get account creation notifications for a given site, and can't even contact anyone to correct it, etc... For a few months, I was getting student loan account notices for someone else, but not enough PII to actually contact them, and layers of crap and people unable to fix it contacting the company in question. I'm not getting rid of my gmail address... mine ... though I do have another add…
On the other hand, I was getting Allstate billing notices for someone else and I was surprised how well they handled it. When I called, they understood that I was a third party and apologized. They were able to look at a record of all the email sent and verify I had not received any sensitive information (only last 4 digits of account number, first name, and bill total). They removed my email address and said they would contact their customer immediately.
The only way they could have handled it better would have been following best practices and sending a verification link as their first email. :)
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When I was writing some shareware and other PC software, there were basically two ways to reach me: write me a snail mail letter or call me. So it was pretty normal to publish your personal phone number (and address). I wouldn't do it today, but those were pretty much the only ways to contact people.
Even if you want to publish a phone number, you can get a voip number for under $1/mo from many providers these days and redirect it as needed, block numbers, send to voicemail, etc. Complete control over it and complete separation. It may have made sense at one point but today it seems crazy.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/
http://www.jaduncan.com/2006/03/centos-vs-city-of-tuttle.htm...
Back in the days of shareware, around 1985, I wrote a program called TXT2COM. It was a simple way of turning a text file into an executable. All a user had to do was run the converted com file and the text file appeared on the screen with full scrolling, search and save. I had my name and phone number embedded in the program. My first problem was when someone converted the Constitution of the United States into a COM…
Knuth is such a class act. I don't think I've ever heard a negative story about him. Contrast him to, say, the harsh laguage Linus Torvalds routinely engages in or the many stories pointing out Steve Jobs' unfriendly side. I'm not 100% sure if you have to be a jerk to get ahead in life and lean towards 'yes' on this but when I see guys like Knuth, I wonder if nice guys do win sometimes. >TXT2COM As an 80s BBS kid, I…
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I'm amazed how many people get their email address wrong. I have . @gmail.com, which is fine, and hardly gets any mail meant for someone else. @gmail.com however, is basically unusable. Funny thing is, the latter was the one I created first, but I forgot the password so had to create the other. I managed to recover it later and I'm glad I have the former.
Sort of off topic, but did you know that the '.' gets ignored in gmail addresses, you can remove it or add extras and you will still get the email.
It's a slippery slope though - forget worrying about remembering or managing passwords, you have to deal with variations of an email address too.
Further, email clients will reply from whatever address you used to setup the client. Maybe you can add aliases, but that will be time-consuming, and even where supported there's usually a single-digit limit. This can cause real headaches - e.g. "reply with `UNSUBSCRIBE` in the subject line to be removed from this list" and being unable to reply from the right email address.