In these last days
of the Usenet, commercial vultures are hanging about and grepping
through news like crazy to find email addresses they can foist
off their scams and products to. As a reaction to this, many
people have started putting nonsense addresses into their
From lines. I think this is
counterproductive—it makes it difficult for people to send
you legitimate mail in response to things you write, as well as
making it difficult to see who wrote what. This rewriting may
perhaps be a bigger menace than the unsolicited commercial email
itself in the end.
The biggest problem I have with email spam is that it comes in under false pretenses. I press g and Gnus merrily informs me that I have 10 new emails. I say “Golly gee! Happy is me!” and select the mail group, only to find two pyramid schemes, seven advertisements (“New! Miracle tonic for growing full, lustrous hair on your toes!”) and one mail asking me to repent and find some god.
This is annoying. Here's what you can do about it.